From the age of 10, Aileen Pannecoucke knew she had a gift.

In her native Belgium, a coach at a local swim club had told her mother she had a talent for swimming, one worth pursuing.

Her mother was on board. Her father, a former cyclist, was not so much.

Knowing the demands of competitive sports, he feared it would be too brutal for Pannecoucke at her age.

He eventually gave in.

“We had to argue with my dad, and eventually he gave in, and I was allowed to start competition,” Pannecoucke said.

Her years of swim lessons had blossomed, and after joining her local club team, SOS, her love and talent for the sport continued to grow.

After a few years, she joined a sports academy, Tosport School, and began to draw interest from colleges. She ultimately committed to swim at the University of Idaho under Mark Sowa, the program’s longtime head coach.

“I really liked the coach there,” she said. “I liked how invested he was in me as a person beyond the swimming aspect.”

Pannecoucke took her talents to the Palouse and swam for the Vandals. But the pool wasn’t all she picked up there.

She also fell back into a piece of her childhood, and her father’s old sport, taking up cycling on the side and growing a fondness for it alongside her days in the water.

She graduated from Idaho in 2019, then came to Pocatello to pursue her master’s degree at Idaho State University, where she won a collegiate national criterium championship.

Her father, once wary of handing his daughter over to the demands of competitive sports, now had a national champion cyclist for a daughter, in his own sport.

Pannecoucke has dedicated her life to sports, and now her two loves, swimming and cycling, have combined into a new pursuit.

She is a triathlete and has competed around the world in events combining swimming, cycling and running, a discipline she’s still adjusting to.

With her college career behind her, she still finds the motivation to push herself to the maximum every day.

“I love suffering to a certain extent,” she said. “I love trying to figure out what my body can do, and trying to push my body to its full potential.”

That drive, paired with the demands of competing as a triathlete, shapes a training routine built to match her goals.

As a lifelong swimmer, she still logs three to four intense swim practices a week. Cycling follows closely behind, with about four rides a week, including one long ride meant to mimic the endurance demands of the Half Ironman’s roughly 90-kilometer bike leg.

Running is the newest, and in some ways the hardest, part of the equation. She typically runs four times a week: one high-intensity track workout, a long run on the weekend that sometimes comes directly off the bike, and a couple of shorter 40-minute-to-hour-long runs in between.

“Being a swimmer, my body is not 100% used to the impact from the running yet,” Pannecoucke said. “We’re trying to build that impact where my body and my tendons get used to it.”

Pannecoucke is preparing for a stretch of major races to put all that training to the test.

After finishing the Half Ironman in Coeur d’Alene, she’s turning to the Half Ironman in Boise, followed two weeks later by USA Nationals for the Olympic distance in Milwaukee.

In September, she’ll head to France for the Half Ironman World Championships, then to Spain about two weeks later for the Olympic-distance World Championships.

She was always destined to be an athlete, one who defies the odds. But now, she’s giving back to the next generation.

When she isn’t training for world championships, she’s at Pocatello High School, working as the swim coach.

“As a coach you get to see other people fulfill their dreams and their goals,” she said. “It’s your job to help them reach whatever goal they are wanting to reach.”

To her, coaching is about far more than blowing a whistle but about inspiring her athletes to reach their goals.

“It almost brings me more joy to see them achieve their goals than to achieve my own goals, because I was part of their process,” she said.

She doesn’t show up every day chasing state titles or medals. She shows up to inspire the next generation, and to help them find some of the same joy she’s found throughout her life.

“Sometimes it might be hard, and you might struggle, and there might be parts of your life where you fail and things don’t go as planned, but you can persevere,” she said.

It hasn’t been easy for Pannecoucke, but at every step of her career, she’s worked to make sure her ability and love for competition never wavered.

“It is possible to do very hard things and to push yourself and to reach your full potential, if you believe in yourself and if you work really hard,” she said.