MILES OF MEANING

'Two Friends, One Diagnosis & A Guinness World Record Attempt Across Ireland'
Exclusive Interview with Matt Knaggs & Colin Goodman
Featured in 'Innerviews'
Hosted by Allié McGuire

​Matt Knaggs and Colin Goodman are friends divided by an ocean, but united by cause. Both live with multiple sclerosis. Both know the fear, uncertainty, fatigue, and fight that can come with diagnosis. And both have chosen to meet MS not by standing still, but by moving forward, one mile at a time. Together, they are preparing to run across Ireland from Mizen Head to Malin Head in pursuit of a Guinness World Record, raising awareness and funds for MS along the way. This is more than an ultra-marathon. This is a message in motion. This is what it looks like when friendship becomes fuel, purpose becomes pace, and hope learns how to run.

ALLIÉ: Matt, you were told after diagnosis that you might be in a wheelchair within five years. Colin, your first symptom showed up in such a disorienting way, like seeing two footballs while playing with friends. Can each of you take us back to the moment when MS became real for you and what changed inside you after that? Matt, let’s start with you.

MATT: I think the moment it became real for me was when I finally heard the words from a neurologist that I have MS.
I had been having so many issues for about nine months leading up to that point and feeling as though doctors weren’t listening to me, or I just wasn’t getting any answers. A lot changed at that point. Hearing those words was obviously not good news, but at the same time, it was like, thank God we know what it is and I’m not crazy.

​Hearing time after time, “Nothing’s wrong, nothing’s wrong,” when you’re feeling all these crazy things going on inside your body, you can go a little bit crazy.

What changed for me was gradual. At first, there was this adjustment period of asking, “What do I need to stop doing, start doing, or do differently?” There was also a period of depression, saying, “My life is no longer going to be the same.” While that is true, I was viewing it through a negative lens at that point in time.

Thankfully, after a couple of months, I started to see things much more positively and decided, “Why stop doing all the things that my body may one day tell me I can no longer do before my body actually makes me stop?” I had this epiphany of, “No, I need to do everything I can for as long as I can and make the most out of my experience with MS.”

ALLIÉ: Absolutely. It’s doing what you can while you can, and I think that’s true for all of us, no matter our diagnosis, but certainly with MS. Colin, how about for you?

COLIN: This is where you see Matt explains things so chronologically and so nicely, and then there’s me, who will jump about. So good luck keeping up with me.

In the early days, I had double vision in one of my eyes. I went to the optician, and the optician said, “Your eyes are fine. We’ll give you a letter to the hospital.” I went to the hospital, and a girl checked my eye and did all these tests. I left not really knowing anything. Obviously, she didn’t discharge me, so she knew there was something there.

Then I had another appointment, which I missed. I can’t remember why. Just family life, as you do. You miss an appointment. But in a way, it was a good thing because later on I went back, and I must have been having a flare-up that I didn’t realize was happening. My eye was off the chart. I was seeing really bad double vision in one of my eyes.

She didn’t let me leave the hospital that day. She sent me down to the specialist eye people. They brought students in. They looked at my eye and said, “Check out this guy’s eye. It’s really messed up.” I kept thinking, “This isn’t great.”
I was very lucky because she said, “We actually have a neurologist in the building today.” At that stage, I had been in the hospital for maybe four or five hours. My wife was back at home wondering what was going on, because at that stage I had three boys. I still have three boys and a wife, and everyone was wondering why Colin had been in the hospital all day.

I went up to the neurologist, and he did tests on me. He checked my legs, my eyes, this and that. I thought everything was fine. At the end of it, he said, “Yeah, it could be MS.” I was like, “What?” It was a bit of a shock.

A few months later, I got a letter telling me to go to City Hospital to see a neurologist. At that stage, I didn’t really know it was MS. I wasn’t sure. I went in to see the MS nurse, and she said, “How are you feeling, Colin?” I said, “I am feeling fantastic. I’ve been looking after myself. I’ve been getting better sleep. I’ve started working less. I’m feeling brilliant.”

She got up, walked out of the room, and said, “Can I come back in a wee second?” I said, “Yeah, crack on.” Then the neurologist came in. Brilliant guy, Gavin. He sat down and said, “How are you feeling, Colin?” I told him the exact same thing. I said, “A guy said I had MS. It’s a lie. I’m feeling great. Everything’s brilliant.”

He opened his book and said, “Well, your vitamin D levels are low.” And on an MRI, it did show that I had MS. By that stage, I had been through MRIs and everything. They said, “You do have MS, Colin.”

I said, “Okay.” At that stage, it was a bit of a shock. I obviously thought I had cured MS in the early days and I was fine. Long story short, I asked, “What drugs do I need to go on? What do I need to do? Where do I need to start?” From then, I just stuck my head in the sand and hit it straight on. I started running, and that was my diagnosis story.

ALLIÉ: I love that you were like, “No, I’m fine. This is good. I’ve got this.” But that also speaks to the fact that with MS, there are good days and bad days. On the good days, we can feel like, “Yeah, I’ve got this.” And those moments don’t always stay. ​I think both of you can relate to something I often say, which is, “I can’t run from MS, but I can run with it.” When you hear that, what does it mean to each of you personally? Matt, what does that mean to you?

​MATT: You can’t change the diagnosis or the fact that you have it, but you can still do whatever it is you can with the diagnosis. Even running may not look the same as it might have once looked, and that’s okay. There is this adjustment and acceptance, which I’m terrible at, of saying, “Hey, it’s not going to be the same as it might have otherwise been.” But for me, it’s almost an act of defiance. Well, yeah, I’m not even supposed to be able to walk right now, so you’re darn right I’m going to run with MS. No problem. I’m going to do it for as long as I can.

ALLIÉ: For sure. Colin, anything to add to that?

COLIN: Before MS, I never ran a mile. I wasn’t a runner. Running wasn’t part of my life. I played a wee bit of football, but I had to run to a ball. That was my running. But with MS and running, as Matt says, it’s defiance. I saw it as a challenge, a challenge I accepted, a challenge I took straight on.

I think it’s part of my positivity. You don’t know what tomorrow brings, whether it’s MS or not MS. We all have our own challenges. We all struggle to run. Running isn’t easy anyway, but having that MS monkey on your back, I see it as a bit of a challenge. I can do something here to inspire people and to help people. Running with MS isn’t just me running for me. I’m running for everyone to show them that, like Matt said, we’re capable of incredible things.

ALLIÉ: Absolutely. The two of you are proving just that. You are friends divided by an ocean, but connected by diagnosis and purpose. How did your friendship begin, and when did you realize there was more of a connection than just running?

MATT: Colin, I feel like I always answer this one. I want to hear how you answer it.

COLIN: Unfortunately, me and Matt became friends. I’m only joking. I suppose you’ll see it from two sides. From my side, I started running, as we’ve said, and to promote my first-ever attempt at running Mizen to Malin, I thought there was this positive place online, this Running with MS group, where I could share my story and raise a bit of awareness.

I asked the guy who runs the page, “Any chance I can share my story? I don’t want to send everyone a message saying, ‘Look at me, give me money, I’m trying to raise money.’” And the guy called Matt said, “Yeah, no problem. That’s why we’re here. Go ahead, share your story.” He seemed like a really positive guy, and we still have that message to this day. We actually looked at it a few months back.

I tried to run the length of Ireland and failed. It’s now known as the Mizen to Nearly Limerick run because I didn’t even get to Limerick. From then, I settled into this Running with MS group on Facebook. I got chatting to Matt, got his WhatsApp, and every other week maybe we’d chat. That turned into more of a friendship. We had more in common. We both liked running. Matt is very similar to my brother, and my brother is one of my best mates. They’re both into Marvel and all this other weird stuff.

I think we just started to become friends. Even without MS, I believe if we had met in the street, we still would have become friends or connected in some shape or form.

As the story goes, Matt then wanted to take on a big adventure one day, and here we are. We just got talking more. Now, as I would put it, I talk to Matt more than my own wife at the minute. Matt, did I miss anything?

MATT: No, I think you covered it pretty well. The only thing I would add is where this run came from. After Colin made it to nearly Limerick, he had been saying for a while, “I’d like to try that again one day.” We had thrown it around for a good two years, like, “Maybe I’ll do it with you.” Then we got serious about it. “Okay, when are we going to do this?” It went from this imaginary thing to, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we did it, and we did it to raise awareness and raise money for MS charity?” Around July or August of last summer, 2025, we pulled the trigger, as they say, and decided to make it official.

​COLIN: A year early from our initial plan, by the way. It’s like a wedding. Sometimes you just can’t wait and you have to move it a year forward. Matt decided to move our wedding day, which is our run, a year forward.
​
MATT: Ironically enough, both Colin and I had planned on getting married to our wives a year later than we actually did. We both moved our weddings up a year after getting engaged.

COLIN: It’s a true story. There’s a weird connection. Matt’s birthday is about two weeks after mine. I’m slightly older. I’m the wiser one of the two of us. You wouldn’t believe it, but I am.

MATT: Two weeks, but born in the same year. We’re both on Ocrevus. We both have three kids, roughly the same age. And we both moved our weddings up a year.

COLIN: We’re both idiots.

ALLIÉ: And you’re both going for a world record. But before we get to that, let’s talk for a moment about what people outside of you will see. They will see the physical miles, the roads, the climbs, and the resulting fatigue. But what is something invisible about MS that people won’t see or maybe just don’t always see? What is something that is not seen but really felt?

MATT: I have a wide range, really. Usually my challenges start off invisible, and then they’ll get to the point where someone would look at me and say, “There’s something wrong with that guy.” We’re crossing our fingers that doesn’t happen on the run.

For me, often what will happen is I’ll get numbness or tingling throughout various parts of my body. I’ll get blurred vision. Those are things nobody would typically see. Those are things I’ve become used to while running, so they no longer frighten me.

I’ll also still get what’s known as Lhermitte’s sign. The more active I am, if I look down and move my head downward, I’ll get shocks of electricity through my body. But again, most people wouldn’t recognize or see that as it happens.

If I’m having what I would call a bad MS moment, I typically get extremely weak to the point where visibly, you wouldn’t know what is wrong. You might think maybe that guy is hungover or had too much to drink the day before.

Generally speaking, I’m a very happy, positive, outgoing guy. But in those moments, it’s like I don’t even have the strength to smile.

Hopefully we don’t have any of those moments, but MS is unpredictable, even more so when you’re pushing yourself physically to the extent that we will be. We’ll deal with that as it comes.

ALLIÉ: Colin, how about for you? What’s something invisible?

COLIN: It’s invisible, but not invisible…

Physically, I’m generally quite good. Running and everything else is fine. But it has happened on podcasts where I’ll break into tears. We now have a trigger where if Matt sees me breaking into tears, he takes over and it cuts away from me because he knows exactly what’s happening.

There must be an area in my brain, lesions that trigger it. I’ll start talking about something that’s remotely emotional. It doesn’t even have to be emotional. It can be something random.

For example, on one of my runs previously, I think I ran maybe five miles. If anyone had driven or walked past me and seen me by myself running about five miles in tears, they would probably think, “That guy’s having a tough day.” But inside, I actually wasn’t emotional. I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t down. It was just, “I can’t stop flipping crying.”

​But it’s okay. That’s why I say it’s visible but invisible. I’ll get to an aid station, and people are like, “I need to give this guy a hug.” And I’m going, “I’m actually okay. It’s just my MS.” They ask, “Is it making you depressed? Is something wrong?” And I say, “No, it’s actually just the tears coming.”

It’s a weird part of the disease, which I never associated with myself. I was never emotional before. I would never have cried. Then all of a sudden, bang, I was hit with MS and floods of tears all the time.

It’s a strange one. It’s a hard one for me to deal with because I don’t like showing the vulnerabilities of me, I suppose. It’s hard for me, being a man, running, doing big miles, and crying. It’s a strange one to explain and talk to people about. But hey, I’m over it and I get on with it now.
​

ALLIÉ: You bring up such a good point because MS presents so differently in all of us who live with it. It is not a cookie-cutter disease. It shows up differently, not only in each of us, but in each of us differently every day.

Like you, Colin, I have a lot of tears. Mine are very emotional tears. Either way, tears are antifreeze for the soul. I fervently believe that.

Let’s switch gears and talk about this world record. You are pursuing a Guinness World Record for the fastest crossing of Ireland on foot by a team with MS. Beyond the record, what do you hope this run proves?

MATT: At this point, I don’t think there’s anything I’m trying to prove to myself. If it’s about proving anything, it’s more about showing others that life doesn’t have to be over because of MS.

No, it doesn’t mean everyone with MS is going to run 350 miles. But it does mean that you can find your Ireland, whatever the big thing is that is going to push you and motivate you, the thing you might say, “There’s no way I could ever do that.”

Before I was diagnosed, walking a mile seemed impossible. That’s where I was before my diagnosis.

For me, over the last six-ish years, it has been about extending myself, pushing myself farther, and realizing that we are capable of so much more than we often allow ourselves to believe. If we believe that we can, it’s going to push us to try much more than we otherwise would have.

Even if we don’t accomplish our goal, we’ll do more than we knew we were capable of.

ALLIÉ: I love that. Colin, how about you? What do you want to prove with this?

COLIN: I’m with Matt. I don’t think it’s about proving. It’s about showing and inspiring. It’s showing people that being diagnosed with MS, or any other disease, isn’t the end of the world.

For example, I got a message from someone in Ireland that hit me quite hard, especially because I have children of this age myself. His child had been diagnosed with MS at 12 years old. It was a recent diagnosis, about 18 months ago, which is really, really rare.

Getting into that parent’s head, he probably didn’t know where to turn. What is the future like for his child? But by seeing someone like myself and Matt doing what we’re doing, it gives hope. It lets him say, “Do you know what? They could actually run the length of Ireland.”

It’s not proving something to us. It’s proving, I suppose, to the world that you don’t have to stop because of some disease. You just keep going. You find what you enjoy. You find your Ireland.

​We say we’re running the length of Ireland, but as we’ve kind of coined the phrase, we’re more having fun in the length of Ireland. It’s an adventure. Matt and I get to run together. We’re going to have fun. It’s going to be great craic, as we say over here. It’s going to be great banter.

So, nothing to prove. Just to show people: don’t hold back on what you can do with yourself.

​ALLIÉ: With MS, the journey doesn’t stop. It continues. It looks a little different. Maybe it even gets better, especially with good friends.

When we talk about the tools we have in our toolkit with MS, there are different treatments and different approaches. But friendship, the bonds we build along the way, and the points of connection we find, that is everything.

Thank you both so much for taking the time to share more of your story and yourselves. Good luck as you find your Ireland, find great success along the way, and have a good time at the same time. Thank you for helping all of us become a bit more aware now.

MATT: Thank you. It was great talking with you.

COLIN: Thanks so much for your time and thanks for the opportunity to chat and spread our story. ∎

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Follow Matt on Instagram:
@runningwithms_official
Follow Colin on Instagram:
@idiotsgorunning