When he’s not writing best-selling novels and teaching, he’s scaling Everest and running ultra marathons at the North Pole. And Michael Collins has plenty more tricks up his sleeve
Words: Declan Quigley Photography: Thomas Butler - courtesy of the Red Bulletin
For some people, life only really starts to make sense when they stop running and stand still. For Michael Collins, it’s when he stops that things get difficult. Like the day in 1995 when a stroll instead of a sprint to the supermarket through a Chicago ghetto ended in a slashing with a serrated letter opener wielded by a drug addict. Or the time during the 1999 Everest Challenge Marathon when he lay supine on Himalayan scree, with his oxygen-starved lungs in danger of choking him into life-threatening hypoxia.
His response to each crisis, as always during his pinball-style trip through a dizzying array of extraordinary projects and obsessions, is to take to his heels, racing his way to sanity and serenity at world championship-level ultramarathon pace. While his expanding oeuvre of seven novels and short stories is already ensconced as a collection in Trinity College, Dublin, and his status is already elevated by one of his books being nominated for the Booker Prize shortlist (along with numerous other international accolades), Collins refuses to let the emotional intensity of literary creativity consume all his energy.
Instead, with another novel brewing, a young family clamouring for attention and various other projects, philanthropic and otherwise, filling his diary, the Michigan-based dynamo still finds
time to pound out the miles towards the World 100k Championships, which will take place in Italy next April.
Having led the Irish squad at the 2010 World 100k Championships in Gibraltar, Collins is going back for more in Italy in April, where he hopes to equal or better his 2010 result of bronze medal. But more than any chase for medal, it is the privilege to be involved in “one of the noblest sub-cultures of sporting masochism” which carries him through the daily drudgery of training.
Collins is dapper in a relaxed way, casually dressed but with a clear eye towards personal grooming. Setting off the precision informality of his jeans and black shirt is a pair of well-made black leather brogues that he kicks off for the photoshoot; adaptable, rugged and a bit of a sartorial throwback to the Ireland he raced out of in 1983 but which has not yet left him in any emotional sense.
Dark, brooding good looks suggest Pierce Brosnan might get the job of playing him in a movie biopic. But there is nothing of his fellow countryman’s clumsily reconstructed Irish accent in Collins’s soft tones, the edges of which are barely scuffed by almost three decades spent living in the US.
His friendly, barely prompted delivery is an almost non-stop, stream-of-consciousness monologue and carries an Americanese inquisitorial slope at the end of each phrase which seems less Dawson’s Creek and more about interrogating the idea he is delivering – the writer in him examining every idea and testing it for delivery.
It’s certainly been a life less ordinary, a whistle-stop tour of the US and then on to the four corners of the globe with occasional staging posts for significant, life-altering experiences.
Collins, now 47, was brought up in Limerick and Dublin, his early years spent flitting from school to school.
His father’s job as head of CIE Tours, a holiday sales wing of the national transport company, seems to have helped set the tone for a wanderlust existence.
Athletic prowess soon blossomed and a year spent in high school in New York in 1981 produced a string of top middle-distance performances that helped earn him an athletics scholarship from a selection of universities looking to boost their track credentials.
Before that could be contemplated, Collins returned home to St Munchin’s in Limerick, to complete the last two years of his secondary school education as a boarder in a school with a rich athletics heritage although, at that time, no proper weights room.
After leaving St Munchin’s for good in 1983, he headed back to the States and his choice of athletics scholarship. The contrast between Irish second level and US third level couldn’t have been more marked. Young Collins, advised by middle distance legend Eamonn Coghlan, and showing maturity beyond his years, opted for a college that placed at least equal emphasis on academic development as it did on sports results.
“I met Coghlan out there and he kind of mentored me in terms of looking at the school and looking beyond it,” says Collins. “I could have gone to Arkansas or one of those places but I ended up going to Notre Dame in Indiana. I just thought the competitiveness of division one sport all the time means that academia gets marginalised. It wasn’t as high powered at Notre Dame, whereas the other schools were producing national champions all the time.”
Without a working visa and not interested in returning to Ireland, his college summer holiday the following year was spent driving from town to town throughout the Midwest, sleeping in his car and occasionally running the gauntlet of less enlightened locals on training runs that honed his fitness and, just as importantly, helped reveal a fast-changing nation to a newcomer.
Having escaped from the oppressive greyness of pre-boom Ireland, Collins, while passionately nationalistic, was in no hurry to return too soon and the road trip exploration of the US was repeated during the following two summers as he immersed himself in his new culture.
Embracing the Notre Dame College experience to the full, he emerged from the Indiana city of South Bend with a masters degree in literature, married and with a used-up body which was crying for a break from competition.
His decision to marry his medical student girlfriend, Heidi, while still in college was, he freely admits, prompted by a looming need for legal status, though it was clearly no Green Card marriage of convenience given they are still together. In thrall to academia at this time, Collins then threw himself into studying for a PhD in literature at the University of Illinois in Chicago where, during the most sedentary phase of his hectic life, he had his encounter with the drug-addled attacker in a shadowy back street near his apartment.
The unprovoked frenzy, which was witnessed by his wife, had a profound effect on him. The immediate impact was that it left him with a harder attitude to the denizens of Chicago’s mean streets.
Of more long-term significance, it got Collins back into running.“I’ve got to get fast” was his mantra as he lay in his hospital bed, and soon his scurrying from building to building developed into a full blown rekindling of his love for the sport that had originally helped finance his studies.“That got me back in to running,” he says, recalling the attack and his urge to move on quickly afterwards.
“We literally couldn’t move out of the area. They could be a bit hard-nosed about rent, about getting out of your lease and that type of thing. It was a mile and a half from the school so...“We just waited. There was a nice woman and I’d just got published and she wanted signatures and I said to her, ‘This is what happened to me’. She said ‘Well, you signed the lease, if you can find someone else to take over the lease…’ I can’t remember, it was like three or four months. So I started running all the time...
“This arm was OK, it was, like, 22 stitches but in the back he’d chipped a vertebra and that was sore for a good while. I was conscious of it. I did that, and that got me back in to running and
I did the Chicago Marathon in ’95 or so.”His marathon endeavours produced a time within five minutes off the Olympic qualifying standard and revealed hitherto untapped potential in endurance running.
Always testing and pushing the boundaries, the wonderful world of ultra-long distance and adventure running opened up before him just as a career as a writer was germinating. Victories in the Last Marathon in Antarctica and the Redwoods Marathon in California in ’97 displayed a talent not fully expressed over shorter distances.
He admits now that the emergence of the ‘ultra’ brand of running very much plays to his athletic strengths.
“I didn’t like the track as much as cross country,” he says. “The American scene was more about the track and real raw speed and tactics. All that stuff. You have to play into it but it wasn’t my forte. I preferred to be on long runs up and down hills and through cross country.
“The five kilometre distance was kind of too short and you’d finish the race and think, ‘If only that was a bit longer...”
Before Collins could complete his doctorate – though finish it he did in 1998 because he’s nothing if not persistent – he was pulled in a new direction as a result of taking a part-time job looking after the computers in the college library. Natural curiosity led him to learn how the computers functioned so he could help users get the most out of them and soon he had taught himself programming. A chance encounter led him to meeting up with a group of computer academics working on internet applications.
He completed his PhD but his head had been turned and he was soon headhunted by Microsoft to be a programmer at their ‘campus’ in Seattle, which was tantamount to a royal summons in those days.
For an outsider, it was literally as well as metaphorically a tough place to find your way into and, for many, just as tough to find a way out.
“Seattle’s filled with all these floating bridges, so it’s a really hard city to navigate by car,” says Collins. “It was around 19km to work and it could take you two hours, so running was easier.” The thrill of being at the cutting edge of the home computer revolution soon palled as he contemplated interminable meetings fuelled by fast food. Surviving on as little as four hours’ sleep, he was soon working on his first novel, furtively drafting the acclaimed Keepers Of Truth longhand rather than risk it being discovered in a computer sweep.
The treadmill at the gym became his other refuge, an outlet for his boundless energy and an important conduit in the creative process. “Beginning a book or a story on a run has always been for
me the most natural process,” he has written. “I could not imagine sitting before a blank piece of paper.”
A mind like Collins’s needs plenty of active stimulation and risk is rarely something to be avoided for long. The repetitive treadmill sessions were broken up occasionally by runs through the trails near the campus, with attacks by bears an ever-present threat.
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