You may remem­ber back in May Ultra X partnered up with the Nation­al Run­ning Show, Inner­Fight, Tobi­as Mews and MyRaceKit to offer two lucky people the prize of a life­time — Ultra X entry to Jordan, train­ing and much more!

Last week­end we caught up with Max to find out a little more about how train­ing was going and what he had been up to.

Q) What your goals are for Ultra X Jordan?

A) I stu­pidly told Rob [One of the coaches from Inner­Fight] I wanted to win my age group. That will no doubt be some­thing he reminds me of reg­u­larly! It is also most prob­ably going to be the most com­pet­it­ive group! I want to do well and learn to run a multi-stage without mak­ing any obvi­ous mis­takes. I see this as an oppor­tun­ity to become a bet­ter and faster ultra-run­ner.

Q) What has Inner­Fight got you doing and how you are find­ing it?

A) Rob is focus­ing on mak­ing me run faster. We are doing tempo runs and pyr­am­id runs. My nor­mal pace is 5.50 (m/km) but Rob has me doing ses­sions at 4.20. I can already feel the bene­fit and can­not wait to run with my old train­ing part­ners in Lon­don. Rob also has me doing core and glu­te workouts as he says these are vital to multi-stage suc­cess. We train 6 to 7 days a week, with a focus at the moment on improv­ing VO2 max and my lact­ic acid threshold. Both are quite low I think!! I have one advant­age in that I have a strong aer­obic base because of all of the long slow runs I have done over the past 10 years.

This week is a good example of my train­ing plan at present:

Monday

Warm up:
15 mins easy run­ning around 5:00/km pace.

Main set:
4 mins at 4:20/km
2 mins easy 5:40/km pace

Repeat for 6 sets

Cool down:

A fur­ther 10 mins steady run­ning bring­ing the heart rate back down to 150 for most of this.

Tues­day

Warm up — 5–10 minutes min­im­um easy run­ning, fol­lowed by 5 minutes of dynam­ic exer­cises to mobil­ise the joints and muscles and increase range of motion, fol­lowed by 4–6 x50m runs build­ing up to 80% max intens­ity each time.
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Main Set: 2 x 3200m as fol­lows:
200 at 5k pace, 15s rest
400 at 5k pace, 30s rest
600 at 5k pace, 45s rest
800 at 5k pace, 60s rest
600 at 5k pace, 45s rest
400 at 5k pace, 30s rest
200 at 5k pace

5 minutes recov­ery between sets

What I want max is con­sist­ency here. 4.25/km for each of the reps.
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Warm Down: Easy run­ning until you feel relaxed and com­fort­able. Con­duct some easy mobil­ity or stretch­ing exer­cises and refuel.

Wed­nes­day

A Kenyan style run here, split into 3 x 25 minute blocks:

1. 25 minutes build­ing, start easy and build up to a nice steady endur­ance pace. After 15 minute or so do 3 x 15 second ‘pick ups’ with 45 seconds easy
2. 25 minutes as 5 x (3 minutes @ 4.35/km pace/2 minute easy recov­ery)
3. 25 minutes strong endur­ance pace, faster than your first 25 minute block

Thursday

Core and glu­tes — 45 minutes workout

Fri­day

A very simple ses­sion. Find a start point/route that will give you around 25 minutes of easy run­ning before you find an incline (hill/bridge) that would take at least 1 minute to run up it at a strong (4.30/km ish) pace)

Spend 25 minutes on the ‘hill’ run­ning 1–2 minutes up at 4.30/km, with a very easy walk/jog back down

Nice and easy run home

Sat­urday

Long run. Not easy, but not hard. A good long steady run — some­thing around 5.30/k gives you 21k

Q) What you have been doing since win­ning the com­pet­i­tion?

A) Brag­ging to all who will listen about how much faster I now run. I am try­ing to per­suade a mate of mine to sign up but he is ex-army and hates train­ing! Speak­ing with myRaceKit about what I need in terms of equip­ment. My two con­cerns are foot care and enough cal­or­ies. They have so much exper­i­ence that I want to tap into.

Ultra X Jordan 2019 is now sold out, how­ever you are able to grab a place on the wait­ing list here.

If you enjoyed this art­icle you may be inter­ested to read about some of the train­ing that the 2018 Jordan fin­ish­ers did.