Current adapations of his novels include The Resurrectionists to be directed by John Madden, the Oscar winning director of Shakespeare in Love. Lost Souls is currently being adapted by A Film Monkey Production.

Collins is a member of The Irish National 100K Team, which finished 8th at The World 100k (62 miles) Championships in Holland.

Awards

Movies

Athletic Sponsors

Backcountry.Com

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Kobold Watches

Trinity College Dublin Acquires Collins' Manuscripts

Collins Award - Dowagiac High School, Michigan

Collins Award - Brisbane, Australia Secondary School Arts Awards

Collins as Athlete

• Winning The New York State X-Country Championship
• Winning The Eastern States Two-Mile Championship
• A fifth-place finish at The Fifth Avenue Mile
• A fourth-place finish at The American National Championships X-Country Championship
• A third-place finish at Irish Nationals over 5,000 meters

Extreme Adventure Marathon Wins Include

• The Last Marathon (Antarctica, 1997).
• Redwoods Marathon. (Northern California 1997).
• The Himalayan 100 Mile Stage Race (India/Nepal Border 1999).
• Everest Challenge Marathon, considered one of the most grueling extreme runs in the world. (India/Nepal 1999).
• The Sub-Sahara Marathon (Saharawi Refugee Camps, Algeria. 2006)
• The North Pole Marathon (North Pole, 2006)

Collins Takes 5th at The 2007 USA (USATF) 50 Mile Trail Championships

World Championships

The Irish men’s team finished 8th at The World Championships in the Netherlands. Running with just three runners, Ireland needed all runners to finish to secure a team finish while most other countries used their allotted six runners. Martin Rea set a new PB of 7:21:42 to finish 29th, while Thomas Maguire (7:31:05) and Michael Collins (7:37:57) finished 37th and 39th.

Collins’ time also established a new Irish veteran record and placed him 10th in the World 100K Master's Race which was run simultaneously with the World Championships.

On the women's front, Helena Crossan of Donegal set a new Irish women’s running record of 7:52:45 to clinch 10th place the Championships.

Fire and Ice Challenge

Fire - The Sub-Sahara Marathon

The North Pole Marathon

The race is run entirely on Arctic ice floes, with a mere 6 to 12 feet separating competitors from 12,000 feet of Arctic Ocean. Ice rifts are known to occur in the ice, even at the pole, adding an element of danger to the run.

On Being Stabbed - Running for My Life - Discovering Ultra-Running

The marathon distance, legend has it, goes back to Athens, 490 B.C., when a messenger soldier named Pheidippides was sent by foot from a battlefield near the town of Marathon to Athens, some 24 miles away, to herald news of Greek victory over the Persians. As legend goes, after Pheidippides delivered the message "Niki!" ("Victory!"), he collapsed and died.

Two millennia later, the same sense of urgency that drove Pheidippides has been resurrected in a sub-culture of extreme marathon racing which pits athletes against distances far in excess of the traditional 26.2 mile distance and in some of the most inhospitable places around the globe. There are extreme marathons in the searing heat of the Sahara and Gobi Deserts, in the drenching rainforest of the Amazon Jungle, to the heights of Mount Everest, and in the polar deep freeze of the South and North Poles. In this sub-culture of athlete/humanitarian, each marathoner is driven by personal and often philanthropic goals, championing personal triumphs over adversity, raising awareness and money for charities, each running with a message of "Victory". It is, without a doubt, one of the noblest sub-cultures of sporting masochism into which athletes can be initiated.

My own personal journey into this sub-culture happened years after I'd burned out on a college track scholarship. I was living in Chicago, doing my doctorate at a university set near one of the city's most notorious slums. The urban makeup of Chicago was typical of the abrupt American divide between rich and poor, the slum area on one side of a no-man's land park which served as a divide from a row of re-gentrified 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 '95, in this strange and incongruous world I'd called home for almost four years without personal incident, I became a victim of a vicious attack by a crazed drug addict, who, without even asking for money, just exploded into a frenzy as I walked past him, stabbing me in the back and slashing my arms before I fell to the ground, flaying my legs against what turned out to be a ten-inch serrated make-shift blade. In the end, I managed to get my wallet from my back pocket and throw it to the side. The perpetrator grabbed it and disappeared down a Church alley, known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, leading back to the slums.

I had known the clear and present dangers of living on the frontlines of poverty. Two years earlier, a medical student had been dragged down this same trail, raped and murdered, but somehow I'd always felt the unwarranted invincibility of youth. I remember my first reaction was a sense of shame. I felt diminished. In fact, I was furious at me! In the hours that followed, as I came out of shock, I asked myself, rhetorically, "How had I let myself become prey, me the scholarship athlete? How had I let myself be taken down like some creature out on a savanna?" My gut reaction became a sort of mantra of survival, as I repeated over and over, "I've got to get fast…" I heard a cop who'd come to interview me say candidly 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, while duly informing me, for the umpteenth time, 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 inner city poor. I hated the sight of them, found myself racing down streets, cursing - the running man.

During that time, the O.J. trial had taken on a vast cultural significance, the anticipated verdict predicted to be another flashpoint in race relations. White America was hunkered down, black America waiting to spill out onto the streets. It seems like such ancient history now, in the retelling of it, but back then cops poured into my neighborhood in force, and trapped, all I could do was run and run.

In early October, '95, O.J. got his "get out of jail free" card, and, if America breathed easier in the wake of the verdict, I didn't, still psychologically scarred. My new mantra was, "Catch me if you can, Nigger!" A few months after being stabbed, I lined up at 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 the Olympic Trial Qualifying Time. I still had this latent running talent, though the motivation was different, not dreams of Olympic glory, but mere survival.

That spring, I chanced to see a posting for a local 10K race, thought nothing of it, other than there was a $250 check for first place. It was a race that ended up being sponsored by the parents of the murdered medical student, the 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 - the 10k race, a natural choice to celebrate her life. The field included friends and relatives, medical students and faculty, along with local church groups of teenagers. I remember listening to her father, and feeling a humbling sense of remorse immediately for the reactionary hate I'd let get hold of me.

The race course took us past the infamous Ho Chi Minh Trail where a wreath of flowers had been laid where the girl had been murdered and where, but for fate, I, too, might have been numbered among the dead, though, 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 in the youth group black kids who hung around after the race as medical staff volunteers showed them how a blood pressure cuff worked, let them handle stethoscopes and listen to one another's hearts. The post-race fraternity eclipsed the race which had been merely a pretext to reach across the socio-economic divide.

In the ensuing years, I left behind road racing for an emerging sub-culture of extreme marathon racing where 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 sub-culture of braggarts or proselytizers. In this cult I have found the perfect balance of my boyhood need to run, coupled with doing good. Each marathon has had its own 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 in the failing days of Argentina's economic collapse. Four days later I read The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner aboard a Russian Ice Breaker while crossing the Drake Passage, and on through to the Antarctic Circle where I ran The Last Marathon on the Antarctic continent.

In October, 1999, to celebrate the end of the millennium, I traveled to the border of India/Nepal to run the Everest Challenge Marathon, an arduous 100 mile stage race. En-route to India, I stopped to experience the robotic efficiency of South Korea, a country like a giant video game, traveled through the smog and abject poverty of Old Delhi, before departing for the hillside spirituality of Darjeeling, snaking my way toward Everest, where monks in saffron robes blessed our passage, indulging the personal quests of us western runners.

This year, I continued what has become part of a tried and tested methodology: six months writing a book, then six months extreme training, then escaping the modern world for some distant and exotic marathon. I came up with a self-titled Challenge, Fire & Ice, pitting myself in two marathons run five weeks apart, where the temperature difference could potentially be 130 degrees. In February I lived for six days in the Sahara Desert in a refugee camp preparing to compete in The Sahara Sub 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 I plan on returning next year to lead a marathon group committed to raising funds for the camp's schools. Almost incidental to the socio-political impact of the experience was the fact that I outran the former two time world marathon champion and London Marathon winner in the actual event.

Five weeks later, in April, I headed north to compete in The North Pole Marathon where the noblest of deeds were silently accomplished alongside the sheer madness of running a marathon on the frozen sea at the top of the world. The event wasn't merely about the vain glory of reaching a geographical landmark.

After a grueling marathon saw some athletes out for almost 10 hours in -30 Celsius, I watched the next day these same runners, huddled and tired, leave the comfort of the heated tents and go silently about their dual mission here at the pole, their humanitarian mission. I watched them move toward a hillock of pressure ridge and place letters in a makeshift grotto. A runner confided in me later what had gone on, the letters for Santa, given by children in hospitals, their last abiding wishes that Santa read them. Sadly, almost a third of these children had died before their letters were placed at the Pole. It is the most indelible memory I have of the North Pole.

I give you this glimpse into our secret lives, into what goes on in our sub-culture of extreme marathon running, but, if by chance we meet in some distant land on the starting line, don't expect such noble sentiment in my eyes, but the atavistic stare of a predator high on adrenaline, for we are a breed, equal part competitor and humanitarian. It's what sees us through these marathon distances 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.

How an Irish Immigrant came to write American Novels! The Long and Winding Road to Publishing Success.

I can trace my life as a writer to a series of diary entries I sketched while traveling across America in the early eighties… “The edge of Oklahoma City is a dome of light. It looks like a space colony. Tonight a storm prowls the sky overhead. The AM radio tracks the night’s tornados. It is best to take shelter, so I have stopped at a rest area. Outside, the sky flashes, the afterglow like an x-ray. Thunder rumbles, then claps and explodes in a concussion of sound. It feels like the loneliness of war, alone at this late hour.” At a payphone, I call Ireland to tell them where I am. It is one of those moments when I want to talk, to tell somebody about what I am experiencing. I feel the distance in the static of the line, like a form of time travel. It is hard to explain this America, so I don’t try. I just hold the phone to the night and let it speak for itself.

That was how I was, an Irish immigrant, a distant relative of the national hero, Michael Collins, living out of car in the summer of 84. It was an exile of my own choosing. I didn’t want to go home. I was on an athletic scholarship at an American university, but unable to work in America legally during the summer. So I decided to travel in an old station wagon, see America, and keep training. It was a journey without an agenda other than curiosity. I was nineteen years old. But it was a trip that would change my life. Over the course of three summers I visited almost all of the states in the continental USA, drifting from cities along the East coast, through the Rust Belt of the Midwest, and further west into badlands of baking heat and sand.

I witnessed the death of an old America. I drove into, and ran through, a chain of run-down towns along the Great Lakes, ran through the great dynasties of Cadillac and Pontiac, the industrial towns of America. People told me it was insane to go into these cities and sleep in parking lots, and especially to run through the burned-out shells of the old industrial parts of these cities. But I ran fast, faster than any human being occupying those places, and I felt a strange sense of invincibility.  Of course, that belied the reality of how fast a bullet could travel, or the fact that I could be attacked while sleeping in car lots. But I took the chances. I moved at a pace and speed natural to a human being, roaming into alleys, climbing chain link fences, foraging through the remains of old buildings. I felt the sense loss and deprivation in these dying cities. It was something communed without words mostly, just experienced through a sense of sight and smell, and tinged with a contagion of fear. I stared into the faces of people who had been left homeless, ran by prostitutes and drug dealers. I was chased more times than I can count, and that added to the adrenaline, to the euphoria of this intimate and dangerous proximity. It heightened in me the predatory instinct of an animal, quick-paced and alert, taking in the range of its domain. At a human level, I processed everything. I felt like I had come upon a hidden disaster, some terrible secret.

By the next summer, I returned to the Rust Belt, sleeping in my station wagon in parking lots, or at rest areas and camp grounds. I began to immerse myself in the hardship of peoples’ lives, and began to understand Americans’ fears and hopes, feel the cadence of how they said what they had to say. It seemed the dismantling of America and the death of Industrialization was for each American a personal guilt trip and not an occasion for workers to band together in unions to try and preserve their jobs, as happened in the United Kingdom throughout the Thatcher years. The notion of taking responsibility for your own economic and spiritual salvation was the single most important thing I learned about how America works. In 1981, there were over 2000 murders in Chicago alone. That was more than all the people who had been killed in the Troubles from 69-80, and, yet, America was not at war, or at least it wasn’t calling it war, and neither were those doing the killing, or those being killed. But I felt on the front lines of a war.

In my final year at college, after years of winning races and gaining All-Ireland and All-American status in running, my legs were ruined and injured from over-racing, I faced a major problem graduating, since I was behind in credits. Without any literary aspirations, and wanting to gain some easy marks, I enrolled in a writing course. I assumed I would write stories about America, about what I had seen on my travels over the summers. Often after running I took a bit of paper and pencil and wrote down sentences or fragments of thoughts about what I saw. These had piled up over the years. However, what I’d seen just wasn’t accessible to me. Fiction is a ruminative process, and, though I knew what I wanted to say, somehow it needed an American language to describe itself, and I wasn’t yet capable of capturing the tone and cadence of what I’d seen.

Instead, I found myself creating a set of stories about life in Ireland, setting it in contrast to the America around me. I think it was a reflexive immigrant trait, since some of the most haunting and sad visions of Ireland have been set down by its immigrants in both song and story. Before I could describe America, I needed to first define what it was to be Irish. Most of what I wrote in that creative writing course were bits and pieces of stories I’d heard from people when I was growing up. In truth, the collection of stories entitled “The Meat Eaters” had a forties trenchant bleakness and seemed like they had been written by a man in his seventies. But that was the intention, since the Ireland of my youth had the feeling of an island adrift of Europe, a place that had more in common with the nineteenth century.

Although I continued to be interested in writing and literature, and I began a doctorate in Creative Writing, my life was to change radically. While teaching an introductory literature class to immigrant computer programmers, I heard there was an opening to work within the computer science department. This was before the ubiquity of the Web was to infiltrate our lives. I began by merely documenting early interfaces but soon became proficient in the first generation of Web programming languages and began working with these languages to create Web pages and network applications for interactive learning. It was mere serendipity, but soon, I was at the forefront of what was to become the World Wide Web.

I began working with 3D images of a surreal project called The Visible Human. It was a project in which a death row inmate from, where else, Texas, was executed and his body frozen, then imaged, using all available imaging techniques. The body was eventually sliced into 10,000 slices and digitized. One of the goals of my job was to help replace cadaver study within universities with a sophisticated interactive 3D image library. Of course, the idea that the first man reincarnated in the virtual world, dubbed the “Digital Adam,” but with mortal sin on his soul, did not escape my own philosophical and literary sensibilities. It was yet again one of those moments when I said, here lies another novel, but I was not quite ready to grapple with the issue of the Information Age, even though I had stumbled upon both a real and symbolic character around which to write such a book.

It was during this time, while programming, and after being stabbed one late night waiting for a subway, that I decided to abandon the commuter system and returned to my old ways, running 10 miles back and forth to work. I took pen and paper and began looking for that one sentence that would be the latchkey to writing more books. Beginning a book or a story on a run has always been for me the most natural process. I could not imagine sitting before a blank piece of paper.

I managed to write three more books centered around Ireland while working and doing my doctorate. The most significant was Emerald Underground, in which I finally began writing about my experiences traveling in America in novel form. It was a story about an illegal immigrant, partly based on some of my experiences, and also dealing with my subsequent journey into America’s heartland. I wrote Emerald Underground as two distinct parts. One part was an indictment of Ireland’s practice of forcing young men into emigration. In New York city alone in the early eighties, there were over 40,000 Irish illegal immigrants trying to survive in off-the-books jobs that paid little. The interminable purgatory of that illegal world was something I wanted to capture. It was part of the Irish experience. The other part of Emerald Underground was a road novel that let me begin to experiment with describing America and the American experience. The book was an unlikely success in translation in, of all places, France, and the critical success and rave reviews rubberstamped that my descriptions of America were authentic, and that I had captured the American voice.

In 1998, after completing a doctorate in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois, Chicago, I left for Seattle. I worked for Microsoft. After a long business meeting one morning, I headed off in the hills around Microsoft. It’s an absolute wilderness not 5 miles from the main campus, where there’s a legitimate chance of getting mauled by bears or mountain lions. On a run in the hills, I began creating what I considered a eulogy to old America. I stopped and scribbled down the opening words, “Ode to a Trainee Manager,” and so The Keepers of Truth took form. To recapture the old feeling of euphoria in which I had first experienced America, I began training hard again, upwards of 80 miles a week, stopping as usual here and there, writing down expressions that became the touchstones for what I would write about later that night after work. I gave myself three months to exorcise what I had carried with me for close on twenty years.

And so, late at night, I turned from my computer screen, and, in the midst of the Microsoft empire, I wrote with pen and paper, The Keepers of Truth. I kept off the network, resisted the urge to save time and type everything, since it would have been found, I assumed, by automatic sweeps of the computers on the network. At times I felt like a Neanderthal aboard a space ship, but I think it was that heightened sense of the great cultural shift taking place that made me so desperately want to write. There were days when I slept less than four hours and still managed to write, run, and work.

When the book was finished, I had whipped myself into shape, regaining some of my former status as a national class runner. I had approached this level of fitness a few years previously, after I was stabbed and took to running again. After I got my doctorate, to celebrate, I ran and co-won the Antarctic Marathon, a marathon on the extreme sporting circuit. Again, after finishing The Keepers of Truth, I longed for another experience outside of trappings of modern living. I entered and won what is considered one of the world’s most grueling ultra-marathons, the Himalayan 100 Mile Race and Everest Challenge Marathon, run at some 14,000 feet altitude, setting a record for the Everest Marathon.

These days, I have left Microsoft though still consult many companies on Internet viruses and detection and quarantine strategies. I’ve adopted the murder genre or crime genre since the success of The Keepers of Truth and enjoy combining a suspense element along with the sociological underpinning of my writing. The Keepers of Truth, and The Resurrectionists have been optioned for film and hopefully will appear in the near future.

Essay by Michael Collins on his 1999 Victory at The Himalayan 100 mile Challenge Everest Challenge Marathon which appeared in Solo: Writers on Pilgrimage

Air Hunger

The Everest Challenge Marathon is one of the most grueling feats in ultra-marathoning, a journey that takes us rapidly into the heart of an oxygen-scarce danger zone, where the unacclimatized and even the acclimatized can succumb to potentially fatal High Altitude Cerebral Edema (HACE). All but a handful of the runners have arrived from near sea level just days prior to the start of the race. Slow, gradual ascent over weeks is the key to trying to avoid altitude-related illnesses, but as the morning sun burns off the night’s mist in this thin mountain air, we are already lightheaded, beginning to grasp the full import of the hundred miles ahead.

Such was my pilgrimage at the end of the 20th century. I signed up the race the event via the Internet in the bowels of my windowless office at Microsoft, stuck in the virtual world of code, so far removed from my life on a farm in Ireland. In a lifetime of thirty-seven years, I had gone from milking cows in the morning on a rainy Atlantic isle to this high tech bunker. At the time of this journey at the end of the last millennium, I was looking for symbolism, for quest and meaning — Everest — the tallest place on Earth seemed fitting vantage point from which to see where we’d been and where we were heading.

I was a foot soldier in 1999 of the new digital economy, a Microsoft employee working a 60 plus workweek, in the bowels of a windowless office. It was a pinnacle achievement, working for the richest man in the world, in the Jerusalem of Software, or so I was told. We were, as the story went then in the late nineties, shaping the interface of the future, creating a virtual world, ushering in the synergy of man and machine. Those were the heady days of the Internet revolution, of the Dot.com explosion. Stories abounded about startups raising hundreds of millions, shares rising from mere cents, to over a hundred dollars a share. Millionaires were literally being created overnight with Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) and stock splits.

But for us within the coding machine of Microsoft, the outside world had become non-existent — the demands for onsite presence non-negotiable, which seemed bizarre since we were touting remote commuting, and the virtual workspace. What lay inside was something utterly insidious, a sub-species of programmer that sat all day before a computer, either programming or playing games. The 17’ inch monitor became the entire universe. I was witnessing the first sub-culture creating and embracing a virtual world — the on-line chat rooms, the on-line-catalogs, the real-time network games of Dungeons and Dragons, the on-line porn. We had screensavers on our computers that followed the rotation of the Earth. By entering our geographical location, we could watch a virtual sunrise and sunset — a shadow moving across the orb of Earth. So much for biorhythms, for an innate genetic processes dictating sleep cycles.It felt like being aboard a spaceship, a slow acculturation to a new work environment, what they euphemistically called at Microsoft — the campus, that association with eternal youthfulness and vigor.

In reaction to this new order, to this centering on the machine, I literally started running — running on a treadmill in the quiet of two and three AM, pounding out the miles in a gym, upwards of 17 miles, speeding up the treadmill to its max speed, feeling that need to sweat, to breath hard, to reaffirm my physical self, a feeble animal protest against the banks of computer processors humming in the offing. And on some days, I did leave the mother ship, went off into the mountains surrounding Microsoft, but faced the surreal reality of being attacked by either, bears or mountain lions. I ended up getting more comfortable with the security of the treadmill. It added to my overall sense of anxiety. I was now a slave to a treadmill. Eventually, I had to ask myself would this be my post-modern act on the eve of the new millennium, running like that dog on the beginning of the space-aged Jetson’s cartoon on a treadmill. In the end, I decided for something more authentic, something reminiscent of my own past — an act of nature within nature.

The tension and fear is stifling down in the narrow street of Manaybhanjang. Some are shouting, “Let’s start! Come on!” We are pitiless competitors, and with due formal ceremony of no less than six politicians thanking one another, the race does begin at the foothills of the Himalayas. Two miles into the race, we pass a monastery, and in robes of garnet and saffron, Tibetan monks watch our penitent procession, blessing us as we venture into their venerated mountains, anointing even the steering wheels of Land Rovers trundling into the heavens. We are a spectacle in their world, but they seem to understand our modern dilemma — we westerns — with our money and our lifestyles, even we succumb to doubt, to questions of transcendence, and with the smell of incense filling my head and I feel like a pilgrim for those few moments at least.

By the time I arrive eight miles into the ascent, things change. The spiritual is replaced by fear. There is one seasoned competitor with me, and the psychological games begin. He tells me to walk the steepest gradients, and to run the plateaus, and I regard him with suspicion, but he reminds me there are five days of racing and one hundred miles to cover. The race is the steady, not the reckless. It’s advice you don’t want to take, especially from a competitor, but given the rises we now encounter, I succumb psychologically, and we walk a hundred meter ascent, then on the occasional decline into valleys, my competition, strides out, his bowed legs strong and somehow able to take the downhill pounding. In a matter of thirty seconds he gains fifty meters on me.

So comes the time to realign my goals, to become reckless. I will live or die on this ascent. I sense he doesn’t have the ability to run each ascent, and so catching him on the next rise, I just turn and without saying anything, I lay the gauntlet at his feet — Stay with me if you can — It’s the most primitive of emotions I feel, not hatred, but a survival instinct. I don’t look around, but gauge his presence in my peripheral vision. To turn is to show weakness. Now begins the metronome of my legs, my eyes watching the rutted trail. The beauty of this mountain is lost to me. Through a corkscrew rise of trail, I sense I’m gaining distance, and the euphoria is intense. I keep telling myself to relax. I am but a third of the way into the day’s race. I know all to well the horror of the wall, of that sudden physical and emotional meltdown that can sudden descend, especially in the wake of euphoria.

My heart rate monitor’s LCD blinks 187 beats per minute, well beyond a threshold pace I can sustain for a hundred miles. I told myself not to push beyond 165 beats. The physiology literature warns that the body cannot sustain rates above this for hours at a time. The altitude is also a compounding factor. But I am in the heat of a struggle with this phantom somewhere beneath me in this corkscrew rise of switchback trails. I try to take a deep breath, slack-jawed, and feel the sudden sense of panic beginning to take hold. And again, I wish I’d not read the literature of air starvation, read the accounts of climbers passing out, of the intense nausea that can suddenly descend. Am I projecting this feeling onto myself, because now the euphoria is gone, and I feel cold, and I’m only two hours and forty-five minutes into an ascent that will take nearly five hours? Should I have waited like the runner behind me said?

i fight off the feeling for another half hour, then a sense of suffocation takes hold, a vice grip around my throat as I rise higher. When I try to take deep breaths there is nothing there, and I intuitively feel what is coming. I am about to understand what it is to suffocate, to drown in the sky. My mind has turned in on itself, my eyes hypnotized already dazed from staring at the rutted track, again that metronome of my feet forever moving, forever climbing, but now the distance between what I see becomes blurred. The world is moving too fast beneath my feet. It brings on a sense of nausea, a feeling of being disembodied from myself, dazed. I am cold, despite the day’s warmth. Things are beginning to unravel. My body has moved through different fuel burning mechanisms, ready sources of energy in the blood, depleted. It’s an excruciating metabolic and psychologic meltdown known simply to endurance athletes as The Wall.

I feel my heart contract, then, lurch within my chest. I check my heart rate monitor, and my pulse has spiked to a dangerous 216 beats per minute, and with it comes an impinging sense of panic as the world closes in around me. I take one backward look down behind me, and this indeterminacy, this submission, this fear, he is gaining again, intensifies my fear. I focus on breathing. I tell myself there are only three miles to go. I feel a surge of adrenaline. Three miles — don’t I do that in the morning just to stretch my legs? What you do in this sport is segment the race, break it down into small races — visualize the manageable distances. I will not succumb, but as I round a bend, ahead lies an ascent more suited for crampons than trail shoes.

For the first time in my life, it’s not the sense of fatigue in my legs that slows me. The bellows of my heart and lungs is exhausted. My diaphragm hesitates, and suddenly I can neither exhale nor inhale. Air hunger has taken hold of me. I grab at my throat and buckle on the trail. The proverbial plastic bag is over my face. This thin air holds no oxygen. It is an experience outside of time, this momentary dying. My body is rigid. I try to inhale, turn once more down the trail, still fighting for air. I turn and start again, get a few feet before I blank out — for how long I don’t know. I am alone on the hillside when I come through. I am breathing again, but my windpipe burns, my chest hurts. There is that hallow otherworldly feeling inside my head, a tunnel vision and nausea. I get to one knee and like some penitent breathe long and hard. I have just passed out. It takes a few seconds to process that. I stay that way for a time, just feeding on air, the sky sailing overhead. These are the foothills in the highest place on planet Earth and I am alone and don’t know if I should submit to defeat or continue.

It is anti-climatic that there is no revelation. As I come round, I take my water bottle and drink and assess things around me, and the competitive instinct comes alive again. I am thinking like an animal, survival has replaced fear. Sandakphu is within reach. I stand and feel weak in my legs. My head pounds, but I am slowly adjusting, focusing, taking stock of things. I’ve arrived on the other side of The Wall, on the other side of panic. I feel I can measure the moments before I will pass out, that I can live at that edge. I take a backward look down the side of the mountain. Far below, I think I catch a glimpse of a bent figure on a turn in the trail, and instinctively I turn and begin running again, toward the top of the world.

The outpost of Sandakphu is nothing more than three dilapidated dorms and a dining hall above the clouds. It serves as our first night’s resting place. I arrive, after four and a half hours and twenty-four miles, without any sense of elation, just cold and exhausted. I barely register the peaks of the great mountains. I have one overriding need - sleep. A guide puts a blanket over my shoulders, offers me a cup of tea and bread and takes me to my dorm. A fire burns, illuminating a cold gray corridor and I sit close to the fire and feel the ebb of exhaustion, like a drug. The tea is strong and hot. It fills my chest with a sense of warmth. I finish it, and then crawl away to my sleeping bag, draw my legs to my chest in fetal submission and fall into a fitful sleep. Hours later, I surface into dying evening light. There is noise outside my window. Others are arriving. I go outside again. With descending evening comes an obliterating mountain darkness and a biting cold. In the distance are the lights of the colonial tea plantation Hill Station of Darjeeling. To the North is the mysterious kingdom of Sikkim, and in the East, Bhutan. We gather in solidarity, awaiting the last runners. An Iranian man, Kio Vejdani, emerges from the darkness, his nose smashed and broken from a fall on the gnarled track. He is covered in blood. The medical team surrounds him, and the day is unceremoniously over.

The dining hall is hot, the air suffused with the smell of food. The dark outside is absolute, the wind howls and rattles the hut. Runners shuffle toward steaming tureens of soup, taking bits of bread and rice and returning to a line of chairs against the damp walls. A stunned silence prevails through most of the meal. We are subsumed into the dull, muted world of our own communal grunts, brief exchanges that touch on what had been collectively experienced. As yet, we cannot say in words, what we have learned, but it burns in the sinews of our muscles, in the dull headaches we experience. Some eat, others can’t, or just stare at their food, knowing they should eat, but are unable to. Altitude sickness suppresses the appetite. We have the look of pitiless refugees, or the infirm.

Two doctors quietly take blood pressure and pulse readings, listening to our chests for a fine crackling sound called rales – the first telltale sign of potentially fatal HAPE. Some runners are guarded against this intrusion. Throughout the meal, runners rise and leave. They are here to compete and don’t want to be singled out as sick. Others are here simply to finish. They are battered and worn out, bruised, with swollen limbs. Many are not endurance athletes but have come representing charities, to raise money for causes ranging from Cancer Research to the Abolition of Child Labor in Asia. They define something noble in this race, taking it beyond the sheer madness of endurance athletes, or our modern feeling of angst. A runner from the World T.E.A.M. sports team that includes athletes with disabilities says frankly to himself as much as to anybody else, “I met my demons out there today, and I lost. I know more about myself than I ever wanted to know…” And he finally creates a communal moment of frankness that exposes the humanity and frailty in all of us. There are still seventy-six miles ahead of us, and four more days at altitude. The pervasive fumes from the naphthalene burners heating the soup vats eventually drive us from the dining hut.

Sleep holds no sanctuary at altitude. In fact, sleep is when many people die at altitude. The automatic breathing response is governed, more strongly by the need to exhale excess carbon dioxide, than to inhale oxygen. At altitude, carbon dioxide levels in the blood decrease dramatically as the breathing rate increases in an effort to provide the body with adequate amounts of oxygen while awake. In effect, our automatic breathing mechanism is blunted. Throughout the night, the level of oxygen in our blood drops precipitously low, causing hypoxia, and runners jerk awake at the onset of suffocation. Several times during the night, I have to sit up and focus on breathing, then, I feel the stiffness in my legs, and get up into the freezing cold and walk the corridor. There are other somnambulists haunting the dark. Somebody struggles from a sleeping bag and vomits in the hallway. Tomorrow looms just hours off.

We will have to do this all again, for four more days, and with each passing day comes the physical toll, the blisters and aching muscles, the dull persistent headaches. We have learned to back off, to not reach that threshold where we will faint. We have been humbled. On each day we begin as a group, the time difference between the days, is logged, and each day my adversary pushes me over those first miles, hoping that I will physically succumb, and each day I detach myself from him eventually. On some of these days, the trail edges along narrow, goat-trodden precipices, where the drop-off is more than a thousand feet. If you become disoriented and fall you may never be found. We face the prospect of death in our waking and sleeping hours. We face mortality, and somehow we endure and press on over the hundred miles.

I personally get by, thinking of the windowless domain of Microsoft, of the twenty-hour days coding in the incessant buzz of florescent light that has become my life. I have somehow extricated myself from that world, if only for a short time, and the more I run, the more I feel I must change my life when I return to America. There is nothing more authentic than the struggle each day against this mountain. There are no stock splits, no sudden rise of fall in the market, rather each day, the mountain and I are the same, and the same level of endurance and commitment is required. It’s a simple relationship. I am Sisyphus, but I am a happy Sisyphus.

This feeling of infirmity I carry with me over these days, is a harbinger of what the future will eventually bring — that fated moment when I will not be able to draw that last breath — and how will I account then for my days and what I did on Earth. But for now, I am content in the physical pain of this literal and symbolic journey. I feel in some small way I am reaching back to some migratory legacy deep in our human genes, that despite all the modern conveniences of twenty first century life, I have found a way back into some subconscious collective, some time when we roamed and foraged the land. What I feel is a primal sense of my surrounding, a nervous and competitive instinct to those sleeping around me, a consciousness more concerned with survival than higher philosophical or analytical way of thinking, and it feels like life, a more authentic feeling than I’ve ever felt writing code or novels. I feel infused with a stream of adrenaline, a predatory sneer on my face.

Survival is my sole goal.

Reviews for The Secret Life of E. Robert Pendleton (US VERSION: Death of a Writer)

Death of a Writer begins as once literary prodigy and now a virtual unknown, Professor E. Robert Pendleton clings hopelessly to his tenured position at a Midwestern college. Now, when a campus visit from a rival author, now a superstar, tips his malaise into desperation, death seems the only remaining option.
But Pendleton's suicide attempt is thwarted by a young graduate student, leaving Pendleton relegated to a wheelchair, surviving in a barely-conscious state. It is then that an unpublished novel is discovered in his basement: a brilliant, semi-autobiographical story with a gruesome child murder at its core.

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Entire Review from The Washington Post (Sunday, September 17, 2006)

by Ron Charles

What good is writing a bestseller if it's also a confession of murder?

WARNING: English teachers should not read this novel except under close supervision. Do not mix with alcohol or annual evaluation. If you experience dizziness or feelings of sympathy with the protagonist, do not induce vomiting or self-recrimination. Drink milk and watch Sandy Dennis in "Up the Down Staircase." Seek professional career advice immediately.

The rest of us can consume Michael Collins's new novel about a suicidal English teacher somewhat more safely. But only somewhat. Death of a Writer is as caustic as it is brilliant, a concoction of academic satire, German philosophy and literary criticism mixed up as a haunting murder mystery that will leave you disoriented -- and deeply amused.

After Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, Richard Russo's Straight Man, Jane Smiley's Moo, et al., the comedy of academic life is so well documented that to read those books cover to cover would take longer than paying off your student loans. But Collins's addition to this genre is strikingly smart and decidedly darker, a "glimpse into the gallows of despair that permeated the academic world," as one character puts it. Indeed, Death of a Writer burns with the heat of a million college blue books going up in flames.

We're introduced to E. Robert Pendleton, a clinically depressed, habitually recalcitrant English teacher at Bannockburn College. Founded by a wealthy Russian émigré industrialist, Bannockburn has since grown into a "venerable cradle of mediocrity . . . sold at exorbitant prices to talentless drones of despairing, wealthy parents." Pendleton arrived 22 years ago in a desperate effort to find employment after his career as a writer of experimental fiction fizzled.

Although he is apparently secure and comfortable in this intellectual pasture, "all was not as it seemed here," Collins writes. His employment history has been spotted with periods of erratic -- possibly psychotic -- behavior. Only tenure and medical leave have allowed him to retain his job. He has written nothing for years, and his life is a "failure bestowed with a title, with a bronzed nameplate on a polished oak door. It was that nightmare where you tried to run but your legs wouldn't carry you, tried to scream but nothing came out. That was the sort of silence that belied the long corridors of academic ease."

Disgusted with the "self-sustaining machinery of critical analysis" and "the incestuous nature of literary reviewing" (ouch!), Pendleton "felt at times like a priest turned atheist who continues to preach from the pulpit because there is no place else to go." In a moment of severe depression inspired by the arrival of a bestselling hack from his past, Pendleton knocks back a bottle of pills with vodka and consigns his meager literary corpus to a sweet, perpetual graduate student named Adi Wiltshire.

But once again, nothing goes as Pendleton has planned. First, he doesn't die; instead, he suffers a massive stroke. Second, while caring for him out of a deep sense of misguided guilt, Adi finds an autobiographical novel, called "Scream," hidden under his stairs. It's a discovery that finally awakens her moribund research skills. Collins doesn't let us see much of "Scream," but he lets us follow Adi's earnest analysis of the novel in a marvelous sendup of literary theory and academic masturbation. A weird homage to Stephen King and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, "Scream" describes Pendleton's various conflicts with members of the faculty, his tortured challenge of God's existence and finally his ghastly murder of a 13-year-old girl.

Convinced of its genius, Adi submits "Scream" for publication, and, in a marvelous lampoon of the machinery of mass marketing and critical commentary, it becomes a cause célebre, a sensational bestseller: "Nietzsche meets Charles Manson." Pendleton finally garners all the fame and prestige he always craved but now, sitting in his wheelchair drooling, cannot enjoy or even, perhaps, comprehend.

Collins certainly could have sustained this wicked satire to the end, but after the first section the novel switches to a gritty police procedural. A hardened detective named Ryder, haunted by his own demons back home, arrives to look into the alarming similarities between "Scream" and an unsolved child murder that took place around the same time Pendleton completed his novel. His investigation takes us deep into the grisly details of forensic medicine, child abuse and domestic violence in a small Midwestern town, never letting us forget that in this fertile soil is spawned "the new gothic of Jasons, Freddys, and Carries."

Ryder's inquiry is endlessly exciting, spinning through possible perpetrators and competing explanations, and even provoking new murders designed to stop him. In a dizzying whirl, each of these characters (including Ryder) becomes an object of suspicion. If it weren't so good, so creepy and unnerving, this shift away from academic satire would be disappointing. But in fact what Collins does by supplying us with this indeterminate story is lure us into the act of interpretation, both literary and criminal. At the start of Death of a Writer, we're smirking at the esoteric irrelevancies that fuel critical studies, but by the end of this frightening mystery, we're left wondering about intentionality, the anxiety of influence, the transmutation of stories, the stability of signifiers, the tension between fiction and autobiography as though these were matters of life and death -- which of course they are.

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'Death of a Writer' takes Collins to a new level

Prepare to be amazed ...

Michael Collins' "Death of a Writer" is a stunning tour de force that does a masterful dance through many genres -- page-turning thriller, campus farce, love story, murder mystery, publishing industry satire, psychological study, black comedy, disturbing noir.

The 42-year-old Irish writer, who lives in Bellingham, has taken a huge leap past all his previous work, including "Keepers of the Truth," a finalist for Britain's Booker Prize.

"Death of a Writer" is a true risk-taking book in an era when playing it safe and formulaic repeat works too often dominate the writing trade. It seems much in keeping with Collins' continuing pursuits in the extreme sport of ultra-marathoning, a test of will, endurance and running ability over such forbidding landscapes as the North Pole and the Sahara, sites of two of his competitive triumphs this year.

Collins' new novel returns to the rust belt Midwest, a familiar American locale for the novels of an author who came to the U.S. for a track scholarship at Notre Dame. It is set at the fictional Bannockburn College, a liberal-arts oasis for middling students from families willing to fork over its high tuition.

It's homecoming weekend as the novel opens, an occasion for traditional frivolities, but also the much-awaited appearance on campus of best-selling writer Allen Horowitz. Not thrilled in the slightest, however, is English professor E. Robert Pendleton, who sees Horowitz as his "particular nightmare."

They had both been rising lit stars at one point in their lives, even good friends who shared the same editor and publisher. But Horowitz's career had a rocket's trajectory, while Pendleton's took a downward spiral, his subsequent novels all rejected, his teaching derided, with psychotic episodes that underscore the writer's hopelessness as he plummets to has-been oblivion.

Horowitz' arrival is the final straw, resulting in a booze-and-pill suicide attempt by Pendleton. But he does not succeed at that either, suffering a paralyzing stroke that turns him into an invalid with very limited mental capacities. Enter Adi Wiltshire, perennial graduate student whose thesis is still missing-in-action; she loyally assume responsibility for Pendleton's care.

Her residency in the professor's home results in the basement discovery of a self-published Pendleton novel, an unknown quantity in his sketchy résumé. Wiltshire considers it to be a work of "genius" and enlists Horowitz's aid in arranging for its release by a major publisher.

And, wonder of wonders, Pendleton's "Scream" earns raves ("Nietzsche meets Charles Manson") and climbs the best-seller lists, aided in no small part by Horowitz's laudatory introduction. It is all that Pendleton has ever hoped for in his faltering career but, in a resplendent irony, he is now is an invalid incapable of comprehending its success.

But there soon develops a problem with "Scream." This semi-autobiographical novel detailing a writer's despair includes a grisly account of a 13-year-old girl's murder, a murder that, it is soon discovered, mirrors the murder of a local girl. Could Pendleton be guilty of murder most foul in the name of art?

Jon Ryder -- a burnt-out, discredited detective on a cold-case squad -- is determined to find out. "Death of a Writer" switches gears, turns into a thriller as sudden violence erupts in the dying town, exposing a festering legacy of scandal and cover-up. And a controversy soon develops over whether "Scream" should be dropped as a finalist for the National Book Award because of its apparent link with real tragedy.

Collins juggles these many disparate plot threads and succeeds on almost all levels. Reading "Death of a Writer" is akin to watching a solo aerialist on the high wire without a net, an experience that is tense, scary and utterly riveting.

Make no mistake: This is literary fiction with serious intent, examining such important matters as the pain of artistic creation, the price of success, the isolation of academia, the hopelessness of life in a dying small town. But Collins seamlessly enfolds such meditations into a gripping novel that should leave many readers both mightily impressed and absolutely breathless.

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Entire Review from The Seattle Times (Sunday, September 17, 2006)

A cop, a killer and a professor's suicidal agony

Bellingham writer Michael Collins' "The Keepers of Truth" was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Irish IMPAC Award. In the guise of a journalism/crime novel, it managed to skewer the "arid oasis of industrialism" Collins identifies as the upper Midwest.

This time, in a literary mystery set in academia, "Death of a Writer," Collins seeks the truth about fame and happiness at the same time that he exposes the hyperbole and hypocrisy of faculty life.

E. Robert Pendleton is a tenured creative-writing professor at the end of his tether. He labors away in the mediocrity of "venerable" Bannockburn College, a Midwestern "cocoon of isolation." He hasn't published anything for more than a decade. Adding insult to personal injury, he invites Columbia University graduate and rival, successful New York Times best-selling author and ostensible friend, Allen Horowitz, to Bannockburn for a Homecoming Weekend symposium. Pendleton salivates over the revenge of inviting Horowitz during a weekend when most students roam the quads as "paint-faced drunks," virtually assuring a low to minimal attendance. Wallowing in his own malaise, Pendleton plans his own demise during the same weekend.

It falls to perennial grad student, "big breasted" Adi Wiltshire, to find Pendleton after his failed suicide. She watches over him during his three months in a coma. At the same time she discovers Pendleton's "quasi vanity press publication" of an "autobiographical existential nightmare" titled "Scream."

It consists of the confessions of a child killer: "Nietzsche meets Charles Manson." While Pendleton lies "neurologically lobotomized," a reissue of the novel engineered by Adi and Horowitz becomes an enormous hit. There's only one problem the central plot of the novel resembles the actual unsolved brutal murder of a local teenage girl, Amber Jewel.

Enter cold-case cop Jon Ryder. Ryder wrestles with his own demons a wife who vanished the same year that Amber was murdered; a teenage daughter who lives with his second wife. Nothing if not persistent, Ryder stumbles into the "angst and madness" of academia as he opens a new investigation of Amber's murder. A local cop, a scary "lowlife" prime suspect, and a newspaper photographer round out the group that figures in a grim, bizarre resolution.

"Death of a Writer" is a scathingly dark send-up of chasing the fickle muse of literature at the cost of the soul. Collins accurately underscores the petty and insidious nature of academia with its "untold victims" of faculty hubris. Collins proves that if a tree falls in the groves of academe and no one is there to hear it or see it fall, it will still get deconstructed and analyzed to death.

Entire review from The Philadelphia Inquirer Oct 1, 2006

Michael Collins is the author of six novels and two collections of short stories. The Irish native has won several awards, including a Pushcart Prize for best American short story. The Keepers of Truth, his 2001 U.S. debut, was short-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction.

His latest novel, Death of a Writer, is set in the United States and deals with a crime. But it is far from being a "crime" novel. Death of a Writer is a sort of literary whodunit, and an absorbing, thought-provoking one at that. Yes, the novel invokes the name of Stephen King. But it's also filled with references to Albert Camus, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Sylvia Plath, and William Carlos Williams, and the name-dropping figures in the plot.

The narrative centers on E. Robert Pendleton, a one-time literary wunderkind who is teaching at a small college in Indiana that Collins calls Bannockburn. The year is 1985 and Pendleton, who is struggling to gain tenure, has not produced any significant writing in years.

He is bitter and depressed to find himself struggling to keep his job at a college he considers " 'a venerable cradle of mediocrity,' accredited academic redemption, sold at exorbitant prices to talentless drones of despairing, wealthy parents."

Pendleton is pushed to the brink when his department head asks him to arrange for Allen Horowitz, a fellow novelist, to come to campus to participate in the college's prestigious lecture series. Years earlier, Horowitz had been Pendleton's grad-school classmate at Columbia. Now he's a spectacularly successful author and Pendleton's nemesis.

"Allen Horowitz was Pendleton's particular nightmare, a guy perennially atop the best-seller lists, author of eight novels, and a guy whom he had initially toed the line with, way back in grad school, when both had works-in-progress appear in major anthologies. They had shared the same editor and publisher at first, two rising stars, at least during the initial years, then the divergence, the meteorite rise of Horowitz as Pendleton slipped into oblivion."

Pendleton survives a botched suicide attempt, and everything changes when Adi Wiltshire, a perennial graduate student Pendleton has entrusted with his work, finds hidden in the basement of the writer's home the manuscript of an unknown Pendleton novel. Called Scream, it deals with the horrific murder of a young girl. With Horowitz's assistance, Wiltshire has Scream published, and Pendleton's literary reputation soars.

But questions arise when it's discovered that the murder depicted in Scream bears a striking resemblance to the unsolved 1976 murder of a 13-year-old named Amber Jewel. Jon Ryder, a cold-case detective with troubles of his own, is dispatched from Evansville to investigate.

In addition to Pendleton, Wiltshire, Horowitz and Ryder, the cast in Collins' twisting narrative includes Henry James Wright, the college photographer; Amber Jewel's older sister; an ex-con; a local cop; and a mother whose adopted daughter disappeared near the time of Amber's death.

In the process of peering into Pendleton's soul and untangling the mystery of Amber's murder, Collins also manages to skewer, often in darkly funny ways, the claustrophobia and pretense of academic life, the vagaries of fame, cynicism in publishing, and the shameless practice of blurbing.

Collins writes of Pendleton: "These days he read just the reviews. In fact, he assiduously kept a tally of them with a spreadsheet of who had reviewed whom, charting the incestuous nature of literary reviewing, convinced that the rise and fall of writers had all to do with this tight interconnectedness."

Ultimately, though, Death of a Writer deftly asks us to consider art, fact, craft and authorship. What is an author? Who is the writer? And what is the purpose behind our ancient impulse to create narratives?

Collins provides no simple answers to the questions. But raising them enriches his mesmerizing tale.