The Slowtwitch Podcast: Meet the Irish Couple Who Turned a Love of Cycling Into Their Day Job

This week’s episode of The Slowtwitch Podcast takes listeners across the pond to Ireland, where triathlon couple Aislin Coppinger and Rob Cummins were eager to talk about their time in the sport. Coppinger and Cummins have what many triathletes would consider a dream job, as they own and operate multiple bike shops in Dublin when they’re not busy training and racing.

On this episode, they discuss their business (the shops are called Wheelworx), their journey to IRONMAN racing and more. This is an episode you will not want to miss, so be sure to check it out here.

Finding Triathlon

Cummins became a triathlete before Coppinger. As he says on the podcast, he was a heavy smoker and drinker for years, but after opening his first cycling shop, he traded cigarettes and alcohol for cardio and bikes.

At first, Cummins was all about mountain biking and trail riding, but he says that quickly grew old. Not the riding itself, but the time that it took to drive to a trail, go for the workout and then drive home. To cut down on travel time, he started hitting the roads instead. From there, he found his way to triathlon.

That is how he met Coppinger, who was a serious ultrarunner. As you’ll hear in this episode, she would take issue with being called a “serious ultrarunner,” but while she is too modest to brag, Cummins is eager to do it for her. He pushes her to talk about her many big results in trail running, including a stab at the famed Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, her time running for the Irish national team and more.

“We have several trophy cases in the main store, and I tell people that the trophies are Ais’s, the finisher medals are mine,” Cummins says on the podcast with a laugh.

After meeting, Cummins convinced Coppinger to try an IRONMAN. She says she figured this wouldn’t be all that difficult, as it was a much shorter race than the days-long events she was used to. While Coppinger enjoyed the IRONMAN, she suffered in the aftermath, developing leptospirosis, a bacterial infection that can be contracted from swimming in dirty bodies of water.

Cummins says he looked at the positive side of this experience, noting that Coppinger had fun at the race, so he got her another IRONMAN entry as a Christmas present. Coppinger wasn’t a huge fan of this gift, but she did the race anyway, and all these years later, they’re still in the sport together.

In 2025, the couple travelled to Nice, France (where Cummins raced the men’s IRONMAN World Championship), then Kona (Coppinger competed in the women’s world champs) and finally to Marbella, Spain, where they both tackled the 70.3 worlds. As they discuss on the podcast, this season holds more racing for them, with races coming up in Florida in May at 70.3 Gulf Coast and IRONMAN Jacksonville.

Growing Wheelworx

As Cummins says on the podcast, he learned as he went in the early years of running Wheelworx.

“I don’t have any traditional education, I don’t have what you guys would call high school — I left early,” he says. “So I learned how to run the business by making a lot of mistakes.”

Wheelworx was doing well with Cummins’s try, fail, improve method, but things got more structured when Coppinger joined the team.

“Ais had gone through college and had worked for big construction companies as a project manager and had senior positions and that,” he says. “She knew how a business would work, how systems worked and stuff like that.”

Soon enough, Wheelworx expanded, first as Cummins and Coppinger moved to a larger location, then an even bigger one, and then opening additional stores around Dublin. There are now three Wheelworx shops in the Irish capital.

Cummins and Coppinger also discuss the move to becoming a Trek-focused dealer. Wheelworx is not a Trek shop, but they do have a partnership with the American company and do sell a lot of Speed Concept bikes. Thanks to this link with Trek, Cummins and Coppinger get some sweet rides (which they sported at the IRONMAN and 70.3 world championships last year) that will make any triathlete or cyclist extremely jealous.

There’s a lot more to the stories of Cummins, Coppinger and Wheelworx, all of which is discussed on this week’s episode of the podcast.

Once again, you can download it here.

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