Martin Cox

There are a lot of incredible British ultra-runners: Carla Molinaro, Steph McCall,  Beth Pascall, Fiona Pascall, Eve Moore, Emi Dixon, Robbie Simpson, Harry Jones - to name only a few. What they’ve all got in common is that they are (or were) coached by Martin Cox. I’ve followed Martin on Instagram for a while and have screenshotted his thoughts on pre-race anxiety, durability and adaptation to training. After being lucky enough to speak to Carla and Steph for this blog I was curious to speak to the man himself and find out if there’s a secret behind his huge success and athlete loyalty. This interview is gold dust – filled with wisdom that will be applicable to all athletes.

Martin with Arthur Lydiard in 1999

I started coaching almost by accident. I was a professional road and mountain runner, studying sport science at Bath University, with the intention of working in exercise physiology research. And then I did a coaching module, ended up working alongside an amazing coach named Malcolm Arnold, and realised that this was what I wanted to do. I fell in love with shaping people’s progress, with helping them navigate the uncertainties of training and performance. When I retired from competitive running in 2014, I laid the foundation for what is now VO2max Coaching.

So much coaching today is no more than program delivery. Anyone can now call themselves a coach, sign up to a platform like Training Peaks, and set up sessions for an unlimited number of “clients” (that's always a warning sign, if a coach refers to athletes as “clients”, avoid that coach). But this is not coaching - it’s simply a transaction. True coaching is about deep understanding, dialogue, and building a relationship. Unfortunately, technology and the growth of sports science has created the illusion that a coaches job  is about something else - data output, heart rates, stress scores, and other “metrics”.

Coaching is about relationships. If you only look at the training plan - the workouts, the paces, the stats  - you only see a tiny piece of the puzzle. Training is just one kind of stress among many: work pressure, family commitments, sleep quality, diet, mental strife, and financial worries all affect adaptation to training. You don’t get to see the big picture by staring at a graph showing an athlete's workout data - you get it through conversation. A good coach listens, asks questions, and understands that a runner is a whole human being, not a set of performance metrics.

Matterhornlauf 1998

I ask athletes to write a daily journal. But they are not writing about running in isolation – they write about everything that matters in their lives: home stress, sleep issues, work demands, diet, and so on. That subjective data is what tells me whether an athlete is likely to adapt to training or break down.

Stress isn’t just what happens on a run. It is allostatic load - the sum total of physical, psychological, and social pressures. If a doctor is on call all night, that’s a stressor. Cramming for exams, that's a lot of stress! These accumulate and affect sleep, mood, and recovery, and yet much of modern coaching ignores these realities. If you’re only looking at splits and power numbers, you’re not seeing the bigger picture.

Often the only way to maintain fitness by backing off, not by forcing through. A good coach will cut training when an athlete's life gets crowded. One thing I've noticed over the year is that injuries tend to peak in December. This is a predictable outcome of unchanged training layered onto increased life stress: work deadlines, poor sleep, illness, alcohol consumption, and social obligations. Smart coaches reduce load during predictable stress peaks.

Western States 2022

Training Peaks has been designed to make coaching large numbers of athletes easy. It’s turned coaching into a profitable business model that anyone with a Training Peaks account can do. But in doing so, it has commodified something that’s inherently human and requires years of experience. Metrics can be useful - but they don’t tell you how someone feels. No wearable or algorithm can understand someone’s life context, which is the real driver of readiness to train. I’d rather ask a runner how they feel than rely on a complex suite of stress scores that tell you nothing about what’s actually going on in the athlete's life.

The highest form of coaching is not dependence but empowerment and education. For me, the end-game is autonomy - it's to make myself redundant. The goal I have for all athletes is simple: in five or ten years, they should be able to coach themselves! A coach’s success is measured by how unnecessary they eventually become!

A coach’s job is not to be a god with answers. It’s to help athletes understand themselves, their training, and how to balance life and running. Over time, athletes should learn how to read their bodies, manage stress, and self-correct. When the relationship becomes transactional - the athlete does what coach tells them and uploads data at the end of each day - learning stops and adaptation stalls.

2nd in the Jungfrau marathon

 Nutrition and recovery are huge blind spots. Many distance runners don’t eat well - often they simply don’t take in enough calories. Chronic under-fuelling often shows up not as dramatic collapse, but as unusual fatigue, soreness from innocuous workouts, niggles that never seem to clear up, and dull legs. Many runners mistake this for a training flaw when it is actually an energy-availability issue. If easy training feels disproportionately hard, I tend to look at look at calorie and carbohydrate intake, on a day-to-basis and also before workouts.

Another is intensity. Especially in ultra running, too much high-intensity work can do more harm than good. High-intensity sessions create a muscular environment that may takes days to recover from - and when life stress adds up, these sessions become counterproductive. A hard session does not have a fixed recovery window. For some athletes, it is 48 hours. For others - depending on age, nutrition, sleep, and stress levels - it may be four or five days. Ignoring this variability leads to cumulative fatigue disguised as “mental weakness.”

Balancing the quality and quantity of work is crucial. Two quality sessions done well beat three savage ones survived. Getting the right doses at the right time must be guided by the athlete’s response and enjoyment. The “best” training is that which you can do well, repeatedly, over years. And that's usually the training you enjoy the most!

Enjoyment should be a performance metric. Many coaches are obsessed with chronic training load and other stress scores, along with physiological metrics like HRV and lactate threshold! Yet they never ask the fundamental question: Did you enjoy that workout? Enjoyment tells you something deep about how the brain and body are responding. Ask “Did you enjoy that?” before asking “Did you hit the pace?” If a run felt good, regardless of pace or metrics, that’s a reliable signal of positive adaptation. Coaching isn't applied science – it's interpretation and intuition.

With Scott Jurek on a Bob Graham round recce

Coaching is an art, a craft, not a business transaction. It’s not about putting workouts on a plan, chasing the latest tech trend or magical supplement. It’s about curiosity - understanding the human being in front of you. It's about humility - knowing that there is no perfect formula. Enjoyment, context, conversation, and learning together: that’s where athlete development lives.

Once A Runner by John L. Parker Jr. changes lives. Every runner should read it - not because it tells you how to train, but because it captures what it feels like to commit to the process. It understands obsession, solitude, doubt, and rhythm. That book describes the inner life of a runner in a way no training manual ever could.

I loved Out of Thin Air by Michael Crawley. It’s thoughtful and anthropological - it asks why certain cultures run the way they do and what we misunderstand when we reduce performance to physiology alone. I've spent a lot of time in Africa and this book really resonates with me.

The Olympian by Brian Glanville is a hidden gem. It reminds you that sport exists in a broader social and historical context. Too many people look at athletics as if it began with Garmin, Strava and Whoop! It didn’t.

Scott Jurek’s books - Eat and Run and North - are great because they show the reality behind big achievements. They’re not just about success; they’re about doubt, suffering, and the accumulation of small decisions made consistently over time.

Chris Lear’s Sub 4:00, about Alan Webb, is outstanding. It’s honest, detailed, and uncomfortable in places - which is exactly why it matters. It shows what happens when talent, pressure, expectation, and systems collide. There are important lessons there for both athletes and coaches.

Matt Hart’s Win At All Costs is another book all runners should read, especially if they think success is always clean and linear. It forces you to ask hard questions about ambition, ethics, and the price people pay when winning becomes the only metric.

Don Ritchie’s autobiography, The Stubborn Scotsman, is brilliant - a proper running nerd’s book. It’s detailed, amusing, sad, and deeply human. It shows what it looks like to quietly persist, to love the process without needing constant validation.

And finally, Bowerman and the Men of Oregon by Kenny Moore. This book should be required reading for all coaches. It shows what real coaching looks like: experimentation, observation, care, and humility. Bowerman wasn’t chasing perfect formulas - he was watching athletes, learning from them, and adjusting. That’s coaching.

You can find Martin Cox on his website https://www.vo2maxcoaching.com and on Instagram (vo2maxcoaching). To contact Martin about coaching please follow this link: https://www.vo2maxcoaching.com/contact/.