When he’s not writing best-selling novels and teaching, he’s scaling Everest and running ultramarathons at the North Pole. And Michael Collins has plenty more tricks up his sleeve.
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.
Read the full story in January's issue of The Red Bulletin.
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