As per my understanding you want to remove tick marks on top x axis and right y axis .
I will try to demonstrate using the below example.
a=1:10;
b=1:10;
figure;
plot(a, b, "k");
h=gca;
set(h, 'TickDir', 'out','box','off','color','none')
c=axes('Position',h.Position,'box','on','xtick',[],'ytick',[]);
axes(h)
linkaxes([h c])
xlabel('Distance (cm)');
ylabel('Time (min)');