'When you get older, you can rely on mental stamina'

CELEBRITY FANS/MICHAEL COLLINS/Novelist, 45, Ultra-running: Racing for seven to seven-and-a-half hours tests the physical and…

CELEBRITY FANS/MICHAEL COLLINS/Novelist, 45, Ultra-running:Racing for seven to seven-and-a-half hours tests the physical and mental endurance of an athlete to the limit

How did you get into ultra-running?

Back in ’95 or ’96, I had some money and I wanted to take exotic trips. When I looked around the web, I started seeing things like the Everest Marathon, the Himalayan 100-mile stage race. I was doing marathons, but I wasn’t aware there was this sub-culture of extreme marathons in the Antarctic, in the North Pole.

I was finishing in the top 20 in the New York and Boston marathons, but that was where I was gonna stay. I wasn’t going to get any faster. This was a nice aside – to go off on these adventure holidays. The first one I did was a three-week odyssey down to the tip of South America.

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What distance race do you run?

I stick to 100 kilometres or 100 miles because you’re still running relatively fast.

What was the lowest point you’ve endured in a race? The first time I was on the Irish team for the 100 kilometres, I just went out too fast. I got to mile 35 or 36. I was trying to keep up with the best guys in the world and I just hit the wall. I had no food.

I tried to go on for 10 miles, just muscling it through psychologically and I reached a point where my legs seized. I had nothing left. I lay on the ground, unable to continue.

How long will a race take?

On the roads, at world-class level, you’re talking seven to seven-and-a-half hours.

What do you bring with you?

Just what you can put on your body. The drinks are supplied by the support crew. Things like salt tablets to keep the water in your body, jelly beans for instant energy, but you don’t want to start taking any of that stuff until the second part of the race because it gives your blood a rush.

You can only rush your system so many times.

What is toughest terrain you’ve covered?

The Everest Marathon, which was the third day of a 100-mile race. I ran both and won both. The marathon leg was going up, but with the rest of the 100 miles you’d go up a little bit and then come down real steep passages, rocky terrain where you had snow run-off, leaving these huge holes, so you’re jumping in and out of holes and on to boulders.

When I came back out of that my ankles and toes had all these hairline cracks.

What is your career highlight?

Finishing 37th at the World Championships in Holland in 2007. The Irish team finished seventh. You have five on a team, but we just had three part-time athletes. We beat the English team who were professional athletes. That was very satisfying.

What training regime is required?

One of the advantages of being a writer is that I’ve been able to not work for a year or two here and there, where I’ve just been writing books. This summer, for instance, I’m taking off so I’ll do twice-a-day work-outs – get up in the morning and run seven or eight miles and do 18- or 20-mile runs in the afternoon. There’s a lot of sleeping associated with that. You couldn’t do that and work a full-time job.

How can you be so competitive in your mid-forties?

I never had any knee injuries. I’ve just had some operations on my ankles. In this, you need to have a bit of body fat, too. You need to be 10lb heavier than, say, a 10,000 metre Olympic guy because, at 50, 60 miles you can’t eat enough so you start eating away at your muscles.

It’s a strange convergence for me – you can get back running at an older age, be slower, be slightly heavier than you were in your twenties, but that extra weight in the latter portion of a race is what you need. You’re gonna burn that layer. In your youth, you wouldn’t have had that to burn.

Although you lack a bit of the physiological edge when you get older, you can rely on mental stamina instead. That’s why I keep doing it. You’re hoping that guys will go out too fast because they’re young and that they don’t have the mental strength to continue when it starts getting tough.

Where’s the most unusual place you’ve run?

When you’re out running, you feel slightly invincible. Sometimes I like running into ghettoised areas – like in Chicago in the United Centre, where Michael Jordan used to play with the Bulls, nobody would ever walk into places like that – but you can run into a ghetto pretty fast before anybody pulls out a gun. You get the pulse, the feel of everything that’s on the street. You’re there and then you’re gone.