Max Jolliffe: Cocodona 250 Game Plan, Full-Time Pro Life, and a New Travel Show
4/21/20261 hr 20 min
Max Jolliffe joins the podcast for his third appearance, two weeks out from his return to Cocodona 250. After dropping at mile 238 in 2025 with cellulitis, Max is back for redemption, and this time he's doing it as a full-time professional athlete after leaving Hurley in November following nearly 15 years at the company.
We get into his training block, gear and nutrition strategies, and an upcoming week of course recon out of Mike Versteeg's place in Prescott. Max also walks through his experience at the BPN Backyard Ultra in the Texas hill country and makes the case for why the backyard format deserves more attention from the sport's top names.
Other topics:
- How 15 years in graphic design and apparel at Hurley shapes the value he brings to brand partners beyond race results
- Why race merch across the sport is a missed opportunity and what needs to change
- His new travel show concept, Weekend Training Camp, and the Salt Lake City pilot he's editing now
- When he stopped idolizing effortless talent and started respecting visible work, and how that shift rewired what he looks for in athletes
- Why he doesn't actually love racing and what draws him to multi-day events and backyard ultras instead
- Time goal for Cocodona, day-one pacing philosophy, and why he's staying off the front early
- Prize money at 200s and why the math might need to change
Partners:
- Precision Fuel and Hydration - use code SINGLETRACK at checkout for 15% off your next order
- Norda - check out the 005: the lightest, fastest, most stable trail racing shoe ever made
- Raide - Making equipment for efficient human-powered movement in the mountains
- Janji - premium trail running apparel
- Kodiak Cakes - my favorite oatmeal and pancakes
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsFinn Melanson· Host0:00
All right. Welcome, welcome to the Singletrack podcast. I'm your host, Finn Melanson, and in this episode, Max Jolliffe returns to the show, this time two weeks ahead of the 2026 Cocodona 250. We spend a bit of time at various parts in the conversation talking about his preparation, his race here last year, how he's thinking about race strategy this year, all that good stuff, gear, you know, nutrition. Uh, but we also talk on a bunch of other topics. He was just at the BPN Backyard Ultra last weekend, so we get his take, um, you know, his takeaways from that experience. Pretty interesting. We get into apparel design talk. Uh, he just quit his job at Hurley. He was there for 15 years. He's now a full-time professional athlete in trails. We talk a bit about that. Uh, yeah, it's quite wide-ranging. Um, and yeah, I mean, this is, this is part of our ongoing Cocodona 250 coverage. We just had Courtney on the show last week. Uh, Leah, Brett, and I will be doing a preview episode of Cocodona later this week. We'll be back on the mics post-event for a recap. Yeah, we, we love Cocodona. It's a great time of year. I, I do wanna get to a point in time where we're treating this event with the same level of focus, hype, dedication, et cetera, as we do for, for Western States and, uh, and UTMB. And yeah, before we get started, you'll notice at the outset, we sort of cold open. Max entered the recording room. The conversation was kinda already flowing, and I, I s- I just-- I was like, "Hey, listen, let's just hit record." Carrying enough fuel for big efforts used to be tricky.