IKB Baggersee Aquathlon Innsbruck: Course, Route Profile & Map

Course & Elevation

The swim is 1,000 metres as two laps of 500 in the Baggersee Rossau, a groundwater lake in the Inn valley at around 563 metres above sea level. The women start at 10:00 and the men at 10:15, keeping both fields cleanly separated on a small body of water.

The run begins straight out of the water: five laps of a 1,043 metre circuit on the compacted gravel paths that ring the lake. One lap is the closed lakeside loop run anticlockwise, plus a short out-and-back spur south towards the Josef-Mayr-Nusser-Weg. Start and finish sit on the beach section; you leave transition at its south-eastern end and the finish banner stands to the north-west.

The profile is flat: 34 metres of climbing across the full five kilometres, an altitude band of six metres, just under two thirds of the route level. The gravel is the real difference from a road race, stable, but slower, and asking more attention in the bends of the lakeside ring than tarmac would. The race is staged by the Tiroler Triathlon Club Innsbruck as an open competition from birth year 2012, framed by the EUREGIO Children Triathlon Train.

Pacing Strategy

An aquathlon over 1,000 and 5,000 metres is a race without an intermediate phase. In a triathlon the bike leg lowers the heart rate and loosens the legs; here you leave the water and run at once. From that follows the most important rule: swim the second of the two 500 metre laps deliberately controlled, even if it still feels good. Every second gained there is repaid several times over in the first kilometre of running.

The run course gives you unusually fine-grained feedback in return: five laps of 1,043 metres mean four split times. Use the first above all to check whether your heart rate has come back into a runnable range; it is almost always the raggedest.

The race is decided on laps three and four. Until then the momentum of the start carries you; after that only the honesty of your pacing in the water counts. The classic trap is the gravel: on soft compacted ground you run slower at the same effort than on tarmac, and steering by your usual road pace means overcooking the first two laps. Govern by effort, not by the watch.

Training plan for IKB Baggersee Aquathlon Innsbruck: 12-week build

The aquathlon takes roughly 35 to 55 minutes depending on level. The demand is a consistently high intensity with no genuine recovery phase: some 15 to 22 minutes of swimming at or just below threshold, a very short transition, and then five kilometres run essentially at race pace from the outset.

The transition from water into the first eight hundred metres of running decides it. Physiologically that is the hardest moment: breathing is maxed out, the legs have been almost unloaded for nearly twenty minutes, and the circulation has to switch from horizontal to vertical.

The most specific session is therefore exactly that combination. Weekly, practise 3 to 4 repetitions of 300 to 500 metres of hard swimming followed by 1,000 metres of running at race pace with as realistic a changeover as possible. Add run intervals over 1,000 metres, because the course is five laps of that length, and put part of them deliberately on gravel or forest track rather than tarmac.

Conditions are the second big subject here. At the end of September the Baggersee Rossau sits in the Inn valley at 563 metres, and the water is markedly cooler by then than in high summer. Swim in cold open water at least twice in preparation, settle the wetsuit question beforehand and plan the transition accordingly: going from cold water straight into a run only works with a rehearsed routine; cold feet on gravel are a real problem on the first lap.