Intense Training, Strong Team Fuel Taylor’s Latest Personal Endurance Challenge
By Tony DiZinno
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – There are standard length endurance tests. And then, there are ultra length ones.
What Jordan Taylor just completed from February 14 through 16 falls into the latter. And what stood out most was how the team dynamic of his newest personal endurance challenge rose to the occasion to help fuel his athletic success.
Family ties have fueled most of Taylor’s IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship career, as he’s driven a majority of it with Cadillac Wayne Taylor Racing, owned by his father Wayne, with older brother Ricky somewhere in the team.
That same team approach applied to the younger Taylor’s approach to his third major marathon, but one with a twist. Ultraman Florida surpassed a pair of Ironman Florida events completed in 2022 and 2023, with a three-day affair from that took a standard marathon to another level.
Eight Months of Preparation
More than eight months ago, Taylor committed to the Ultraman. It’s a huge undertaking with a 6.2-mile swim and 90 miles on a bike on the first day, followed by a 171-mile bike race the next day and concluding with a double marathon – 52.4 miles – on the third day.
That tops the Ironman Florida numbers of a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride and a 26.2-mile marathon run, which he’s done twice. The first year he finished the Ironman in 10 hours, 20 minutes and 33 seconds to beat his own goals and expectations, and the second year he dropped under the 10-hour mark with a time of nine hours, 59 minutes and 45 seconds.
Those two times combined don’t equal one Ultraman length of activity, which came together after eight intense months of training and preparation, which Taylor described.
“I’ve worked with a coach named Todd Buckingham for years, and he was a student of Dr. David Ferguson, who works with us on nutrition strategy and driver science for the WTR side,” Taylor explained. “Meeting Todd through Dr. Ferguson basically put together the whole training plan leading up to the event.
“Ricky (Taylor) and Robert (McArthur) joined me on a lot of my longer bike rides and training, but it was really only the last month we started digging into planning and expectations during the event.”
Within a four-week period from January to February, Taylor completed double-duty preparation his Cadillac WTR teammates in the team’s No. 40 Cadillac V-Series.R at both the Rolex 24 At Daytona and then one day of running on Wednesday, February 12, in the sister No. 10 car during the February IMSA-sanctioned test at Sebring International Raceway in advance of the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring. He tested on Wednesday to ensure a return to the Ultraman location by Thursday for athlete briefings.
“Timing-wise, everything worked really well, except for wondering what my weekend ahead was going to look like!” Taylor laughed.
From Sports Cars to Swimming, Biking and Running
Once he left Sebring it was full steam ahead for the Ultraman, which started on Friday in Claremont, Florida and went through Central Florida. Jordan’s team for this event alongside included brother Ricky, Ricky’s wife Emily Nash (Taylor), and longtime friends Robert McArthur and Alex Miller, all of whom played key roles in the event, as if a “human race team.”
As Jordan only half-jokingly noted, “My job was just to basically ride and or run and it was their job to keep me fueled and hydrated! It almost felt like a Rolex 24 where you’re keeping the car fueled and changing tires and putting fuel in it and making sure it never misses a beat and basically my body was the race car.”
McArthur was Jordan’s designated “crew chief,” primary point-of-contact and rules expert throughout the event, as Taylor explained.
“Robert was amazing during the whole thing,” Taylor said. “His wife was actually pregnant and she was having contractions during the weekend. He was super stressed obviously for all different reasons, but he was still there every day and took the job super seriously.”
The team pressed ahead. Ricky kayaked alongside Jordan when swimming. McArthur, Ricky and Nash all ran for miles at various points and Miller served as a consistent crew member. The support team was not only along for the ride but actively engaged with it.
This helped Jordan maintain the appropriate and necessary nutrition and hydration levels, showcasing athleticism and determination in 80-plus degree Florida heat and persistent 20-plus mph winds. Similar to the WTR team at track, the team could even “game plan” to account for the winds to avoid too much buffeting.
With swimming and a 90-mile bike ride, followed by the 170-mile bike ride on the second day and then the 52-mile run on day three, it was worth wondering the Ultraman’s toughest challenge.
“It’s unique; it resets your mind and expectations going into it,” Jordan said. “Going into the Ironman it was like, ‘Holy cow, I have to run a marathon, and I have 13 miles to go.’ Then here I’m thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve got to run a double marathon.’ But then it shifts here to, ‘Well, I’ve only got a marathon to go, and never in my life would I have thought counting down 26 miles would be a nice little checklist.
“The swim was probably the easiest, the 90-mile bike ride was no problem. But the last quarter of both Saturday and Sunday felt super long. Physically, your body is fit enough to finish it, but mentally, you’re at six or seven hours into the day and kind of worn out just from like, consistency of just doing the same thing over and over, like drinking the same things, eating the same things. Your legs are doing the same things. So, it just kind of wears you out and you just kind of have to just remind yourself to keep pushing.”
Taylor made a racing parallel comparison – that the effort here is equivalent to a longer Rolex 24.
“It’s a bit like a Rolex 24 where you have these long stints and time to recover, then you go back again and do the same thing,” he said. “You’re in the car for three hours, then six hours off to debrief, recover, sleep if you can and get ready to go again.
“So here the sooner you could finish each day, shower, rest your legs, start eating, and get to sleep was similar to one of our long races, but on a much bigger level. It emphasizes how important that stuff is in our 24-hour races.”
It’ll be an interesting side note this season that Taylor’s first 2025 podium came in the Ultraman, finishing an impressive third overall with a total time of 25 hours and 50 seconds.
The relief of finishing was one thing, but the joy and exultation in seeing both family and friends at the finish line, then reading an overflow of congratulatory social media comments from his friends and peers, spoke even louder.
“It was so cool to see the kind of support and it was such a good lesson to understand if you put in the time and effort into training, doing the right things, having that goal and sticking to plan, you can finish and do this crazy thing,” Taylor said.
“I felt pretty confident I could finish. I never would have thought I’d finish third. I got so many messages each day from, drivers and competitors from around the world and it was so cool and like I appreciate that side of it because I love kind of sports and challenges like this. I just love that people are into fitness and competition and pushing themselves. Ultraman I’m proud of as an accomplishment, but I think me having done one coming from a background of not running swimming or biking kind of shows that anyone can do it with time and effort.”
Taylor also took time to honor the community he got to engage with during the event.
“It was such an amazing community to be a part of,” he said. “The whole Ultraman group is like a family and really welcomed everyone. Even the other competitors and crew. Everyone supports each other and wants each other to succeed. It was such a great atmosphere.”
Returning to “Race Mode”
Taylor has a podium of the normal variety to defend at Sebring – the top step in fact – after winning his third 12-hour last year with Louis Deletraz and Colton Herta. Hopes are high given Cadillac’s consistent Sebring success over the years; Taylor’s first Sebring win came with brother Ricky and Alex Lynn in a Cadillac DPi-V.R in 2017.
“I feel like from even the first session that we rolled out at that test to where we ended up even when I was there was a huge development and it sounded like even on day two, there were just leaps and bounds of development that they guys found and how happy they were with the car,” he said.
What comes next? Getting back into “race mode” as Taylor calls it, back to the simulator and normal racing preparation. What comes next marathon-wise is to-be-determined, having already accomplished two Ironmans and an Ultraman.
“I don’t know if I want to do another one anytime soon, but one cool thing is that once you finish one like that, you qualify for the world championship,” he said. “Maybe one day that could be something cool to do.”
But first, there are immediate to-do items. Mainly, a normal schedule around the IMSA calendar and date nights with his girlfriend, Peyton.
“I ran through the finish line and I walked back, hugged everyone, then drove home that night, ate pizza and just went on with kind of my weekend,” Taylor laughed.
“My girlfriend Peyton was a rockstar… we missed a lot of date nights over the past eight months just because of my training weekends. So, her only request after the event was like, ‘Can we start having date night a little after like 5 p.m.?’
“It’ll be nice to get kind of back to some normalcy of my life and switch gears. Going into Sebring and Long Beach, my training will definitely change because these are much different intensity to Daytona and this. So, my workouts will have to shift as well.”
Ultraman Photos Courtesy of Jordan Taylor