"Hopefully I'm entering my peak" - Halifax's Max Burgin on his home town, a big summer ahead and his Olympic dream

While LA 2028 is very much in the 800m runner's sights, more immediate challenges include this year's Commonwealth Games, held in Glasgow from July 23 to August 2, and the European Championships, in Birmingham from August 10 to 16.

“Two home championships, which is excellent and should be quite exciting, running in-front of a home crowd,” he tells the Courier.

“It's also great for preparation as well because you don't have to do any form of aclimatisation camp, which can take time out of your season, you can just turn up a few days before and perform.

“It's exciting.”

Max, 23, is from Skirocat Green and went to Holy Trinity Primary and Crossley Heath School.

He joined Halifax Harriers aged eight, where granddad Brian was head coach, and is coached by his dad Ian.

Halifax has been pivotal to Max's journey onto the world stage, starting all the way back with his first ever race win.

“It was the Calderdale Schools Cross Country, in year three, for primary schools,” he recalls.

“There was always three rounds. I think the Calderdale one might have been the third round.

“They were good races back in the day. I used to get so nervous for them.

“I've always been nervous before races, even now, but they used to keep me up at night with nerves.”

Max is still a member of Halifax Harriers and occasionally trains there.

“Every year when it comes round to the British Championships, I still wear my club vest,” he says.

“And I think we have one of the nicer vests in the country, the colours really stand out.”

Success at this year's two home championships could propel Max, and Halifax, into the national spotlight like Stan Moody's run to the World Snooker Championships did.

“I'd certainly hope so. I think Halifax in general does seem to be on the up at the moment, we've got a lot of things going for us as a town,” says Max.

“We've got the Piece Hall, plenty of TV shows that get made around our area.

“It'd be lovely to see a few more sportspeople come through, but we've got quite a few of them now as well, but we had quite a few representatives at the Olympics in 2024.

“We had a mural down in the town centre, in the Westgate Arcade, which had the names of all the Olympians on. I was very proud to be part of that.”

Max had a very successful junior career, breaking age group records at British and European level.

“For quite a few years when I was younger it was all going in one direction,” he recalls, “and then I got to 18 and I started hitting a rocky patch with injuries and for the next five years there were a lot of setbacks.

“I had many years where I was able to run once or twice a season and luckily, those one or two races were enough to keep my hat in the game.

“I was able to pull out one performance a year to keep my name in the conversation and then I'd break down with another injury.

“It was only really last year where I was able to start getting a degree of consistency and I made it the whole way through the season racing an appropriate amount of races and getting to a point where I thought I was showing what I could do.”

Max has had to overcome a series of injury setbacks already in his career, starting with recurring hamstring issues when he was still a teenager.

“My hamstring tendons kept packing up and tearing,” he says.

“I had quite a few bad tears for a few years, simply because they just weren't strong enough to handle the speed I was running.

“I could do certain things in training that my mind would let me do but my body just wasn't strong enough, so it took a few years of working in the gym to strengthen up those areas, I had to consistently do the work in training that I needed for racing and put that problem to bed.

“Pretty much as soon as those issues were behind me I then qualified for the World Championships in 2022, first time I'd represented Britain with a senior vest, I went to Euegene in America and on the flight over I got DVT (deep vein thrombosis) so that was my season finished.

“That was a particularly painful one because that year, there was a World Championships, a Europeans and a Commonwealth Games and I missed all of them.

“We realised afterwards that it came from a susceptibility in my blood that I'd inherited from my mum's side of the family.

“That was a frustrating one, that was another season missed.

“The year after that I developed a problem with my Achilles, which was incredibly painful and disrupted my training. It took a full year to even work out what the issue was.

“It wasn't a standard Achilles tendon injury, it was an entrapment of the nerve that ran through that area and that required a different kind of treatment to sort, it required injections around the nerve to break up the adhesion to the entrapment.

“That again took around a year to sort, so we get to last year and that was a good five, six year period of constant disruption and interruption, that finally ended. I finally had a consistent season and could do what I could really do.”

When asked if there ever came a point when he thought an athletics career wasn't meant to be, Max says: “A bit of that kind of feeling did sort of hit me in the second year of uni, after I had my DVT, that was probably my lowest point because I'd got through all the hamstring issues and then something else completely unrelated had come in and it just felt like it wasn't meant to be.

“But I got through that and I was still able to perform and qualify, even with all these setbacks.

“I think that kept me going because I just thought 'I can still make a career out of this, even with all these setbacks, if I just hang in there and wait until I get my period of consistency, then I can hopefully do something really special with it'.”

And Max is hoping he could just be turning the corner to head into the peak of his running career.

“They say for 800 metre runners, the mid twenties is where everyone peaks,” he says.

“I think 25, 26 is where, traditionally, the greats of the eighties were running their best times and I'm just turning 24 in a few weeks' time, so hopefully I'm entering my peak.

“Training has been going quite well. It's never 100 per cent perfect, there's always a few bits and bobs that are flaring up and causing trouble, but I'd say at the moment, I'm happier with my training now than I was this time last year, so I'm definitely hoping for some good improvement on last year coming into this season.”

Max reached the 800m Olympic final in 2024, finishing eighth.

But getting to the final itself isn't good enough. Burgin wants to push himself to the max.

“It was an achievement to get there, but the race itself was one I'd forget,” he says when asked whether the Olympic final is his career highlight so far.

“I'd say I probably still look back on a lot of the things I won at junior level with the fondest memories.

“It's looking back to a time when it wasn't so professional, it wasn't a job and it was just a hobby I guess, with my dad coaching me and my granddad helping out as well.

“Having said that, it might just be because I was winning things!

“At the world level, I'm not quite there yet, so maybe come this summer's championships, if I'm winning gold, or even silver or bronze, I think maybe that could be one.”

But while medalling at this year's home championships is firmly in Max's sights, the LA Olympics in two years' time is the long-term target.

“That's definitely a long-term ambition to be challenging for medals in that,” he says.

“I was happy with my performance at the last one but I think if I went into one in my peak, in my prime, and not with any of these niggling injuries and being able to give a proper account of myself, that would be perfect for me.

“Chasing medals and chasing records, that's what we all do it for.”