Twenty years in, over a thousand athletes coached, and I’m still spending several hours a week reading studies and questioning everything we do. Ultra performance is a genuinely complex problem — what works for one athlete in one race won’t work for another — and that complexity is what keeps me interested.
There are so many variables — training load, periodisation, terrain, the athlete’s life outside running — and the question I keep coming back to is what’s the right balance of all of it, not in general, but for this athlete, for this race.
Training doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The athlete who’s juggling a demanding job, young kids and limited sleep needs a fundamentally different approach to someone with time to train twice a day. Understanding what’s actually going on in someone’s life — the stresses, the constraints, the motivations — is just as important as understanding their physiology. A training plan that doesn’t account for the person carrying it out isn’t much of a plan.
There’s a line between being so conservative you never evolve, and jumping on every new training trend that comes along. I try to sit in the middle — genuinely open to new ideas, but only when there’s something logical and evidence-based behind them. Ultra running attracts a lot of noise. Working out what’s signal and what’s fad is part of the job.
My athletes range from first-timers barely believing a finish line is possible, to podiums at the biggest races in the world. The approach is the same for both — figure out what’s actually limiting this athlete’s performance, and build everything around fixing that.
Recent athlete results include:
- Sunmaya Buddha — 2nd World Trail Championships 2025, 1st HK100 with course record 2025, 1st World Trail Majors 2025, 2nd UTMB CCC 2022
- Jeff Campbell — Asia Trail Master Champion 2024
- Ryan Whelan — 1st North Downs Way 100 2025
- Lui Fo-Lok — Winner Hong Kong 4 Trails 2024
- Trish McKibbin — 1st Kunyani Ultra with course record 2024
- Current head coach, Philippine National Trail Running Team
Recognised leader in trail running with power
Andy is the world’s most recognised authority on the application of power meters to trail and ultra running — to the point where Stryd, the leading running power meter manufacturer, refers coaches and athletes to Andy for anything trail and ultra related. He has pioneered how power is used as a training and racing tool in the sport and continues to push that thinking forward.
Published and heard
Andy’s work has been featured in publications across Australia, Hong Kong, the UK and the US including Asia Trail and Australian Ultrarunning Association. He hosts the Mile 27 podcast and appears regularly as a guest on leading ultra running podcasts as a subject matter expert.
Building the next generation of ultra coaches
Andy is currently developing the Mile 27 Academy — a coach education program built on the same frameworks and systems he has refined across 20 years of elite coaching. The Academy is designed to take coaches beyond standard certification courses and into the deeper thinking that actually drives ultra performance.
Athletic background
Andy’s coaching philosophy is built on genuine understanding of what it takes to compete at the sharp end of the sport. Career highlights include top 3% at UTMB, representing Australia at the 2009 World Trail Running Championships, winning the 114-mile Hardmoors Ultramarathon in 2010, and breaking the Pennine 100 mile course record by 4.5 hours. Before moving into run coaching he completed the Hawaiian Ironman World Championships twice.
Qualifications
Level 3 Ultrarunning Coach, Australia Ultrarunning Association Diploma of Functional Therapy, FASTER UK Diploma of Functional Performance, FASTER UK Certificate of Advanced Functional Training, FASTER UK Certificate of Advanced Rehabilitation, Regency TAFE Level 1 Strength and Conditioning Coach, ASCA Level 1 Triathlon Coach, ASCA
Work with Andy
Andy takes on a limited number of new athletes each year — enquire here