"Just live life to the full and love every minute of it"
The epic story of how running helped Tony Collier battle terminal cancer
“I was in floods of tears, as far as I was concerned it was a death sentence”.
It’s May 2017 and Tony Collier had just been diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer.
Just days earlier, Tony - approaching 60 but fitter than ever and with all six Marathon Majors recently behind him - had been training for the Comrades Ultra.
“It was the most awful, awful period of my life,” he said.
“I can’t tell you how horrendous it was. I was a sub-elite athlete, training for an ultra marathon and suddenly I was told I’d got prostate cancer.”
This is the story of how cancer has changed Tony Collier’s life. How his running times fell through the floor, his weight ballooned as he undertook chemical castration, and how he suffered such heavy fatigue he could barely get up.
But it also a story of how he has stared that cancer down. How running has been his purpose, his challenge and his friend.
On the way he has run thousands of miles, raised at least as high a number of pounds for charity, and campaigned to raise awareness of the early warning signs of cancer.
It’s a story that began a few years before that heart-breaking day in May 2017, when another health scare helped Tony first discover running.
From ‘Billy No Mates’ to King of the Marathon Majors
Running was not always part of Tony’s life. In fact, he was 45 before he took up the sport.
After his work sent him for a medical, he was told he was borderline clinical obese and his blood pressure “was so high I’d be on drugs for the rest of my life if I didn’t do something about it”.
Tony, a regular squash and table tennis player, was shocked but knew he had to act.
His running career started at an informal club based where he played squash, but within two years he had become a founder member of Styal Running Club.
“I’m not really sure I enjoyed it,” he said. “I thought 10k was a nice distance. It was far enough and I swore I would never, ever run a marathon.”
Famous last words.
After turning 50, Tony and a group of seven other Styal Running Club friends decided “now we were a proper running club we should all have a marathon on our CV”.
They entered the 2007 Amsterdam Marathon, but as the date got closer all seven of his friends dropped down to the half-marathon leaving, in Tony’s own words, “Billy No Mates’ running the marathon on his jack”.
“I ran it like a complete scaredy-cat,” he told Running Tales.
“I was terrified of the distance. I said never again immediately afterwards, but I ran three hours 37, which as a 50-year-old I thought was pretty reasonable.”
Tony was hooked.
His next marathon came in Chicago, where he was joined by another friend who was completing the last of his five Marathon Majors - at that stage Tokyo hadn’t been added to the list of Boston, London, Chicago, New York and Berlin.
Tony said: “My friend’s wife bought him a certificate and had it framed with all his medals - I was completely and utterly envious of it.
“And so I set out to achieved what he had. By the time I did they had added Tokyo, which made it about £15,000 more expensive.”
Now a marathon addict, Tony was able to analyse the high and low points of each of the Majors.
Boston - “an incredibly iconic race” - was his favourite, London '“easily the best for crowds”.
Eliud Kipchoge’s recent world record may have come in Berlin, but Tony said it “is the most boring” course, although that was mitigated by it being “incredibly flat and very fast”.
Tokyo, the final piece in the puzzle, was, “very exotic, very, very unusual but adorable. You run round some amazing sites.”
Despite being in his 50s, Tony was clocking some impressive times, averaging three hours 27 for the Majors with a best of 3’24 in Boston.
Before his cancer diagnosis, he had completed 19 marathons in all, with a PB of 3’23.
“I found I was quite a good endurance runner. I think it is probably because I had such a high pain threshold,” he said.
“The best runners are the ones who can run when it gets really, really tough. I could overcome feeling completely shot.”
“The slowest crawl imaginable through Durban”
“I met a little, old lady on a walking holiday… she had started running when she was 59 and had been British national champion when she was just over 60”.
This chance encounter in the Italian Dolomites set Tony on the path to a fresh challenge.
The ‘little, old lady’ told him about a race he hadn’t heard of before: The Comrades Ultra Marathon.
Run in South Africa between Durban and Pietermaritzburg - and the opposite way on alternate years - the Comrades covers 55 miles (98km) of gruelling hills.
The lady told Tony it consisted of about 6,500ft of climbing and usually took place in temperatures around 30°C.
Tony, a man who had once sworn never to run a marathon, thought “it’s a really good idea to do that”.
His first attempt, in 2015, was scuppered by injury after he picked up an IT band niggle and had to drop out after 20 miles.
But he returned a year later to complete the race in nine hours 46 minutes, a result he describes as “two back-to-back four-and-a-half hour marathons and the slowest crawl imaginable through Durban for the last 5k.
“It finished in the Kingsmead cricket stadium, and it was just unbelievable.
“One year it runs from Durban to Pietermaritzberg - that’s the Up year. The following year is the Down year, so if you do a back-to-back you get a special medal.
“I thought I’d go back in 2017. I would have been 60 by the time it was taking place. And that’s when disaster hit.”
“It was screamingly painful”
Training for the Comrades in 2017 included taking on marathons in Paris and Manchester, but by this time something wasn’t right.
“Being a runner with a high pain threshold,” Tony dismissed “a searing pain through my groin” suffered in February 2017 at the Anglesey half-marathon.
He continued to run with the aid of “a few painkillers,” completing both Paris and Manchester in April.
“When I got back from doing both of those, I couldn’t get my right leg out of the car. It was screamingly painful,” he said.
An appointment with a sports injury doctor and an MRI scan followed. The doctor, noticing something wasn’t right, ordered a blood test and a chest X-ray, then a CT scan.
Just days later, Tony got the news that turned his life upside down - he had advanced stage prostate cancer.
The groin strain turned out to be stress fractures of his pelvis, with the cancer having broken into his bones.
At diagnosis, Tony’s cancer had spread to his pelvis, hips, ribs, neck, spine and skull.
“My first question to my oncologist wasn’t how long have I got left to live, it was ‘can I still run?’,” he said.
“The answer was wonderful because he said, ‘yes, you must, because the side-effects of the treatment we are going to put you on will lead to loss of muscle mass, and loss of bone density, and weight gain, and if you don’t exercise it will be really bad for you and make all those things worse’.”
He was told he might only have two years to live, and in the short term living became very different from what it had been for the super fit, marathon conquering Tony.
“The treatment effectively - and this will shock a lot of men - is chemical castration because prostate cancer feeds on testosterone,” he said.
“They remove your testosterone which basically turns you into a menopausal woman.
“You lose muscle mass and bone density, and gain weight, and all those things are horrendous for a runner. All my times fell off a cliff.”
Conquering the wall of fatigue
Tony had already qualified for the London Marathon before his diagnosis, achieving a good for age time.
Choosing whether to run it or not was not a easy decision. Even basic training had become “really tough” with every day, let alone every run, the victim of fatigue.
“I’d go out for a training run thinking I was going to run 12 miles, or 14 miles, or whatever and after two miles I realised I had this wall of fatigue.
“It was so horrible and I’d literally have to stop, turn round, walk back to bed and I would be in floods of tears because cancer had robbed me of something that I loved.
“It took me a long time to get away from that.”
Despite the fresh challenges he was facing, Tony not only made it to the start line at London - he finished as well.
“I did the London Marathon in a ‘personal worst’ of five hours seven, but I raised £13,000 for Prostate Cancer UK.
“It’s the marathon I’m most proud of because it was in complete adversity. It was the hottest London Marathon on record, and one of the side effects of my treatment is hot flushes and sweats.
“Having a hot flush when it is 30°C and you are running London Marathon is not ideal. I’m very, very proud of that run.”
The following year he decided to run 970 miles across the 12 months - a figure representing the number of men that died from prostate cancer every month in the UK during that year.
“I wanted to run one mile to commemorate each of those men,” he said.
“I found it incredibly tough as I was really suffering with the side effects of the treatment.
“Those side effects have abated a little bit since, and I no longer get the hot sweats and flushes as much as I did. Fatigue is still a big problem. I battle fatigue every single day of my life.
“So it was a big battle to get to 970 miles, but I did it with two weeks to go.”
Next on the list was another ultra marathon. Comrades was out of the question, but Tony entered the two day, 100km Race to the Castle event.
Starting in the Northumbrian moors and finished at Bamburg Castle, Tony described it as “a monumental race”.
He told Running Tales: “I didn’t think I could do it. I had only trained up to half-marathon distance once or twice. It was sheer bloody-mindedness.
“If I had to walk, I walked. I knew I could walk hard if I had to. On the second day I power walked at four miles an hour for about seven hours.
“Walking at that rate is quite hard, but I didn’t have anything left in me to run.”
“If I’d been told I couldn’t run, I might as well be dead”
Tony may still have been running, but the dual effect of his cancer and the treatment he was taking was taking its toll.
“The effect of the treatment is cumulative,” he said. “The treatment itself leads to weight gain, so you get this ring of visceral fat around your middle.
“Running has got progressively harder.
“I got to the point where I was two stone heavier than my running weight when I was diagnosed. I’m probably a stone-and-a-half heavier now, and as we all know carrying a bit of excess weight makes running really tough.
“But it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you don’t do it then it gets harder so that’s why I try to do as much as I can.”
But despite the increased challenges, Tony is convinced running has been good for him - possibly so good it has been keeping him alive.
“Running has been massive,” he said. “I think if I had been told I couldn’t run after my diagnosis, I might as well be dead.
“It’s that endorphin rush when you’ve completed a run. It might feel awful while you are doing it, but you feel fantastic when you have finished it.
“Just to give you a flavour of what it feels like at the moment. At 9am the fatigue is the worst imaginable, and I’ll quite often go and lie on the bed for 20 minutes. I don’t want to go to bed because it is fatigue, it’s not tiredness, so I force myself to put my running kit on and go out and do a run.
“When I get back I feel as if this veil of fatigue has been lifted.
“I feel physically refreshed and rejuvenated, but also mentally refreshed. I think without the running, the dark place you go to with a cancer diagnosis would have been so much worse.”
And the physical and mental health benefits of running may have had even wider repercussions.
Tony tells a story of how he only knows one other runner with a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis: “He said recently there were 20 men diagnosed a year either side of him - 18 of them are dead, two of us are alive and I’m the other one.”
He’s quick to add that it is not all about running. Tony has been lucky enough to respond well to the treatment he has been receiving.
When he was diagnosed the level of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) in his blood had rocketed to 129 - it shouldn’t have been higher than four.
“I started on this hormone therapy virtually immediately, and it brought my PSA down to unrecordable inside seven or eight months.
“It’s stayed there now for over four years.”
These days Tony faces 12-weekly blood tests to monitor those PSA levels, something he has dubbed ‘squeaky bum time’.
Again, running helps: “When you get into that deep anxiety, with squeaky bum time coming along, going out for a run just lifts that anxiety. It’s just phenomenal.”
Champion awareness campaigner
Another thing that has helped Tony deal with his diagnosis is the hope of helping others.
He said his aim, which sees him give talks as a Prostate Cancer UK awareness speaker, is to “make sure as few men as possible end up like me”.
“When you are diagnosed with cancer, the first thing you do is lose a bit of self-esteem,” he said.
“You lose body image. I’m a man with boobs, and I’ve got this ring of fat round my stomach. I look like Mr Blobby.
“The campaigning, for me, is a way of doing good.”
In October, Tony’s work saw him named the North West Cancer Awards’ Male - Champion Awareness Campaigner.
Perhaps the most shocking discovery Tony has made since his diagnosis is that his life could have been saved if the cancer had been detected earlier.
He said: “When I was diagnosed my wife asked the urologist how long I’d had the prostate cancer, and he said ‘probably 10 years’.
“So all my marathon career, all my ultra marathon career, was with prostate cancer growing inside me, and I’d had no symptoms whatsoever.
“I was appalled when I found out I’d had the right to a PSA blood test from the age of 50. If I’d had a PSA test every year from 50 to 60, my cancer would have been caught early and it would have been cured.
“Prostate cancer caught early is completely curable. Unfortunately, once you are diagnosed Stage 4 like me, there is no cure.
“If you’ve got a family history you should get tested from 45, and if you are a black man you should get tested from 45 as the risk for black men is double than for white men.”
Running every day - a new challenge for 2022
It’s November 2022, five-and-a-half years since Tony got the news that changed his life.
Since then he’s done more running than most completely healthy people do, from the London Marathon and an ultra to completing 970 miles in a year.
He’s raised thousands for charities including MacMillan and Prostate Cancer UK, and he’s helped raise awareness of the disease which has inflicted him.
But he is far from finished.
This year he has been taking on a fresh challenge, running or hiking 5km every day in aid of the MOVE charity, which supports teenagers and young adults living with cancer to get them moving again.
He’s already completed more than 1,100 miles and will have clocked around 1,400 by the time he finishes.
“I didn’t think I could do it,” he said. “I’m absolutely shattered, but it’s been a really good challenge - with just shy of £10,000 on my fundraising.”
You can sponsor Tony to complete his challenge to run or hike 5km every day in 2022 here: https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/5k365days
It’s all part of a process Tony credits with so much, both before and after his diagnosis.
Running has gone from something he loved, to giving him a purpose - and he believes it can do the same for others.
“Fitness, exercise, running. I don’t even call it running really. Movement is so important.
“Keep moving, that might be walking, anything that gets your heart rate elevated.
“What I would say, and I’d say this to everybody not just people living with a dread illness, is it’s really important that you live every day to the full and get the most out of every minute of every day.
“I spent the first 18 months thinking about dying. And then I realised you shouldn’t forget about the joy of living through the fear of dying.
“That would be my big message. I think it is such a strong, powerful message and I try to get a bit out of every day.
“I’ve got four grandchildren now. I only had one when I was diagnosed.
“I love the joy of life and I think, just live life to the full and love every minute of it.”
Inspiring story!