Racing around Dublin is one thing. Enduring a marathon across the Sahara or along the slopes of Everest is quite another. The novelist and extreme marathon runner Michael Collins explains why he can't resist it
Legend has it that the distance of the marathon goes back to 490BC, in Athens, when a messenger named Pheidippides was sent on foot from a battlefield near the town of Marathon to Athens, 42km (26 miles) away, with news of the Greeks' victory over the Persians. After Pheidippides delivered the message "Nike!" ("Victory!"), it is said, he collapsed and died.
Two millennia later, the sense of urgency that drove Pheidippides has been resurrected in a subculture of extreme running that pits athletes against distances far in excess of the traditional distance and in some of the world's least hospitable places. There are extreme marathons in the searing heat of the Sahara and Gobi deserts, in the wet of the Amazon rainforest, on the slopes of Mount Everest and in the deep freeze of the poles.
Each marathoner is driven by personal and, often, philanthropic goals. Whether championing triumphs over adversity or raising awareness and money for charity, each runs with a message of "victory". It is one of the noblest types of sporting masochism into which athletes can be initiated.
My journey into this subculture happened years after I'd burned out on a college track scholarship. I was living in Chicago, doing my doctorate at a university near a notorious slum. It typified the abrupt US divide between rich and poor; the slum was on one side of a park that served as a no-man's-land between it and a row of regentrified turn-of-the-century homes. It reminded me of a 19th-century battlefield, where opposing armies lined up against one another, then charged.
In the spring of 1995, after almost four years there, I was attacked by a drug addict who, without even asking for money, exploded into a frenzy as I walked past, stabbing me in the back and slashing my arms before I fell to the ground, where I flayed my legs against what turned out to be a 20cm (10in) serrated blade. When I managed to get my wallet from my back pocket, the man grabbed it and disappeared down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, as it was known, an alley that led back to the slums.
I had been aware of the dangers of living on the front lines of poverty. Two years earlier a medical student had been dragged down the alley, raped and murdered, but I'd always felt the invincibility of youth. My first reaction to being attacked was a sense of shame. I felt diminished. In fact, I was furious with myself. In the hours that followed, as I came out of shock, I asked myself how I could have let myself, a scholarship athlete, be taken down like some creature out on a savannah.
My gut reaction became a mantra of survival: "I've got to get fast." I heard a cop who'd come to interview me say to a nurse: "What can you expect when you live in Niggersville?" I was, in his eyes, the problem.
My landlord suggested I get a gun, also informing me, for the umpteenth time, that I wasn't getting out of the lease unless I found another tenant. I couldn't afford to gamble on paying two rents while waiting for someone to sublet, so I stayed, hemmed in by my own poverty as my heart hardened against the inner-city poor. I hated the sight of them, found myself racing down streets, cursing: the running man.
At the time the trial of OJ Simpson had taken on huge cultural significance; the anticipated verdict was predicted to be another flashpoint in race relations. White America hunkered down while black America waited to spill on to the streets. It seems like ancient history now, but back then policemen poured into my neighbourhood. Trapped, all I could do was run and run.
In early October 1995 Simpson was acquitted, setting off Rodney King-like riots. If the US breathed easier in the wake of the verdict, I was still psychologically scarred. My new mantra was: "Catch me if you can, nigger!"
A few months after being stabbed, I lined up for the Chicago marathon and, on pure adrenaline, finished in 28th place. Out of fear and desperation I'd run myself back to the cusp of a national-class time, a mere five minutes off qualifying for the Olympic trials. I could still run, although my motivation had changed from glory to survival.
That spring I spotted a posting for a local 10km race. I thought nothing of it other than that there was a $250 (€200) prize for first place. The race, which was sponsored by the parents of the murdered medical student, became a memorial run to raise money for a scholarship in her name. The father spoke briefly at the starting line about his daughter, how she'd worked in low- income clinics, her career choice a life serving the poor. She had been a runner, so the race was a natural choice to celebrate her life.
The field included friends and relatives, medical students and staff, along with teenagers from local churches. I remember listening to the father and feeling a humbling sense of remorse for the reactionary hate I'd let get hold of me.
The run took us past the infamous Ho Chi Minh Trail; a wreath of flowers had been laid where the girl had been murdered and where, but for fate, I, too, might have been killed, although, in the heat of the race, I didn't stop to reflect, just dug deep and pushed hard. The healing had begun deep down, without words.
I eventually stopped calling people niggers, saw the dignity in individual lives, saw that day the inquisitive smiles on the faces of black children from a youth group who hung around after the race as medical-staff volunteers showed them how a blood-pressure cuff worked and let them listen to one another's hearts with stethoscopes. The fraternity eclipsed the race, which had been merely a pretext to reach across a socio-economic divide.
In the ensuing years I left behind road racing for extreme marathons, in which athletes with life-altering experiences gather to share the vastness and mystery of our world, where we travel as fellow pilgrims to pit ourselves against nature. We are mindful of our secrets. This is not a culture of braggarts or proselytisers. I have found the perfect balance of my boyhood need to run and my adult need to do good. Each marathon has had a profound effect on me.
In 1997, after my first year of gainful employment, I quit my job, mindful that I had been given a second chance in life. I swore off the nine-to-five-job track, then headed south, where I tangoed at midnight in Buenos Aires as Argentina's economy collapsed. Four days later I read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner aboard a Russian ice-breaker while crossing the Drake Passage, from Cape Horn to the Antarctic, where I ran the Last Marathon.
In October 1999, to celebrate the end of the millennium after writing my novel The Keepers of Truth, which would go on to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, I travelled to the border of India and Nepal for the Everest Challenge, an arduous 160km (100-mile) race. En route to India I stopped to experience the robotic efficiency of South Korea, a country like a giant video game, then travelled through the smog and abject poverty of Old Delhi before departing for the hillside spirituality of Darjeeling, snaking my way towards Everest, where monks in saffron robes blessed our passage.
This year, I continued what has become a tried-and-tested methodology: six months writing a book, then six months of extreme training, then escaping the modern world for some distant and exotic marathon. I came up with a challenge for myself, which I called Fire & Ice, that involved running two marathons five weeks apart, one in extreme heat, the other in extreme cold.
In February I lived in a refugee camp in the desert for six days, preparing to compete in the Sahara half-marathon. I saw the extreme poverty of the stateless Saharawi people, felt the tragedy of a lost generation awaiting a return to their homeland. It was an experience so humbling that I plan to return next year to lead a marathon group committed to raising funds for the camp's schools. Almost incidental to the sociopolitical impact of the experience was the fact that I outran a former world marathon champion and London marathon winner.
Five weeks later, in April, I headed north to compete in the North Pole marathon, in which the noblest of deeds were silently accomplished alongside the sheer madness of running on ice at the top of the world. The event wasn't merely about the vainglory of reaching a geographical landmark. A gruelling race saw some athletes out for almost 10 hours in temperatures of minus 30 degrees. The next day, huddled and tired, they left the comfort of their heated tents and completed their humanitarian mission. I watched them move towards a hillock where they put letters in a makeshift grotto. One later explained what had gone on. The letters were for Santa, from terminally ill children whose last wishes were that Santa read them. Sadly, almost a third of the children died before their letters were left at the pole. It is the most indelible memory I have of the Arctic.
I give you this glimpse into our secret lives, into what goes on in our subculture of extreme marathon running. If by chance we meet in some distant land, on a starting line, expect in my eyes not such noble sentiment but the atavistic stare of a predator high on adrenaline. We are a breed half competitor and half humanitarian. It's what sees us through these marathons over unforgiving terrains, what gets us to the finish line. There will be time enough to talk honestly in the days after, in the journey home.
Michael Collins's new novel, The Secret Life of E Robert Pendleton, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99