Hitting His Stride 

Lanky and awkward, Nicholas Thompson joined his high school’s indoor track team in his sophomore year. At first, he was just an average runner, but he trained hard, eager to improve. That winter, to his surprise, the coach entered him in a two-mile race at the New England Prep School Championships. Thompson did not anticipate being a top finisher. Indeed, expectations for his performance were so low that no one had bothered to tell him that the dimensions of the course were different from those at his own high school’s track; mid-race, he was puzzled by his own split times, even as he noticed that he was lapping other, more accomplished runners.  

To his astonishment, Thompson set a school record. For the first time, he had not allowed his expectations to determine his performance. Years later, Thompson reflected, “If I had understood how fast I was running, I wouldn’t have been able to run that fast. Because I didn’t know the track, because I didn’t know how long the laps were, I didn’t get scared and shut down my body. I just kept going. To do it, I had to first forget that I couldn’t do it.” 

Today, Nick Thompson is a trailblazer in the worlds of technology journalism and magazine publishing. A former editor at the Washington Monthly, Thompson oversaw The New Yorker’s website before becoming editor in chief of Wired. Now, as the CEO of The Atlantic, he has engineered a remarkable turnaround, steering the magazine to profitability, growing its subscriber base to more than 1 million, and overseeing a hiring spree of Pulitzer Prize–winning writers.  

He is also an exceptional, record-holding long-distance runner, who has achieved his greatest success in his 40s, long after most athletes have hit their prime. At age 44, he completed the Chicago Marathon in 2:29, a speed that elevated him to elite status, ranking him among the world’s fastest runners in his age group. Having achieved his goals as a marathon runner, he set his sights on ultramarathons—races of more than 26 miles. At 46, he set an American age group record for the 50K, and then became the top-ranked runner in the world for his age group for the 50-mile run.  

Thompson’s athletic life—and the way it has fueled his professional success and shaped his personal life—is the focus of The Running Ground, an engrossing, unconventional memoir. The book traces a serpentine course, simultaneously a family history, an autobiography, an inspirational guide to middle age, and, most meaningfully, a meditation on running and its lessons for a life fully lived.  

Thompson frames the book, subtitled “A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports,” around his relationship with his father, W. Scott Thompson, an avid runner and occasional marathoner, who introduced Nick to the sport. One of Thompson’s earliest memories is from the age of seven, when he stood in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge clutching a bottle of orange juice and a fresh pair of sneakers to hand to his dad, who was competing in the New York City Marathon.

In a poignant moment of reflection, Thompson writes, “I run because of my father. Running connects me to my father; it reminds me of my father; and it gives me a way to avoid becoming my father.” 

Thompson paints a vivid and compassionate portrait of Scott Thompson, a complex, flamboyant, inexhaustible figure of tremendous talent and intellect, who emerged from a hardscrabble childhood in rural Oklahoma to become a Rhodes scholar, a White House fellow, and a celebrated academic. But at midlife, the elder Thompson’s life careened off track. He came out of the closet and walked out on his family, including seven-year-old Nick. Thompson writes with remarkable frankness about his father’s foibles during the subsequent decades—Scott was an alcoholic and a self-proclaimed sex addict with a proclivity for very young men. He grew unable to hold a job, and spent his later years living in Asia, where he had fled to avoid the IRS and an unpaid tax bill of over $300,000.  

In Nick’s 20s, the two lived together—more like roommates than father and son—and even collaborated on a book. Their home was a Washington salon, with raucous parties filled with diplomats, congressmen, and young journalists. The two shared professional interests in foreign policy and politics, a passion for music and, most meaningfully, running. Thompson writes, “My father led a deeply complicated and broken life. But he gave me many things, including the gift of running—a gift that opens the world to anyone who accepts it.” 

A love of running connects The Running Ground’s two primary narratives—the father-son memoir, and the story of Thompson’s athletic life. Little in Thompson’s early life foreshadowed the great success he has achieved as a marathoner and ultramarathoner in his 40s. At Stanford, a preseason stress fracture derailed his college running career. After graduation, he returned to the sport, flirting with longer distances, including the occasional marathon. Throughout his 20s, Thompson writes, “running was my unrequited crush. I trained like a dilettante and searched for physiological shortcuts that don’t exist. I humiliated myself in races.” Likewise, Thompson comments wryly that his “professional life was the same goat rodeo as my running. I had fallen in love with journalism. But journalism hadn’t fallen in love with me.” 

At 29, he got serious, about both running and his career. On the brink of quitting journalism and starting law school, he applied for a job as an editor of the technology magazine Wired. A week before enrolling at school, he took a grueling, 20-mile predawn run up Cadillac Mountain in Maine, and returned with a renewed focus. “I had just done the hard thing of running up a mountain,” Thompson told his wife. “And it convinced me that I could do this much harder thing of betting on myself. If I didn’t get the job at Wired, I’d write a book.” He de-matriculated from law school, got the job at Wired, then wrote a book. Then he found a coach, established a training regimen, and focused on achieving a major goal, breaking the three-hour time at the New York City Marathon. But just one year later, two weeks after smashing that goal with a 2:43 time (finishing in 146th place out of 37,000 entrants), he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Upon recovery, he was determined to repeat that finish, and did so triumphantly two years later, shaving 13 seconds off his personal record. 

Approaching 40, profoundly grateful for his health, and as a busy professional and devoted husband and father, Thompson had little additional time for training and assumed that he had reached his potential as a runner. Even so, he maintained his fitness and speed with remarkable consistency throughout the next decade, completing eight marathons within a minute or two of his pre-cancer time. 

In 2018, at age 43, Thompson received an email from a team at Nike, inviting him to participate in an experimental program to pair “regular” runners with elite coaches, to maximize performance. The email had landed at an opportune moment—Thompson was grieving the death of his father and contemplating the meaning of middle age. 

Thompson’s father had warned him repeatedly that his life would fracture at around age 40. His paternal grandfather’s life had also splintered in middle age, when a scandal derailed his career as a minister. For Thompson, the pattern was a cautionary tale—if middle age was a point of inflection, how might he avoid the fate of his father and grandfather before him?  

Running, he thought, might be the key. Scott Thompson had run his fastest race at age 40, before his life spun out of control. In his 40s and 50s, he continued to run, but sporadically, for shorter distances, and at slower speeds. Still, it was a healthy habit in an increasingly unhealthy life, and offered structure and discipline. Nick recalls, “As my father descended into mania, the days when he ran were the days he kept everything else in control. If he had run more, could he have done more?” 

Thompson committed to the training program. The Nike coaches challenged common assumptions about the inevitability of runners’ declines in their 30s and 40s, pointing to certain biological advantages that come with age, like the strengthening of tendons and the trade-off of speed for endurance. They offered new technologies that sharpened Thompson’s understanding of his gait, and pushed him to collect data that informed his training. They stressed the need for more intense practices—time spent running fast—rather than additional mileage, and the importance of key metrics Thompson had long ignored, along with recommendations for a healthier diet and a nonnegotiable eight hours of sleep.  

Thompson also benefited from the psychological insights of the training program, particularly a theory coined by the sports physiologist Tim Noakes, the “Central Governor Model,” which posits that pain and fatigue can be psychological phenomena, with the unconscious mind seeking to protect the body. This phenomenon explains racers’ ability to sprint at the end of a long race, despite physical exhaustion. Thompson had learned a similar lesson in his high school race 30 years earlier: “We all can go faster. We just need to persuade our brains not to start the subconscious shutdown process right away. But the only thing we can use to trick our brains is our brains. Training becomes a hide-and-seek with oneself.” 

Thompson came to realize that his relatively modest running goals had held him back. Reflecting on the decade following his cancer recovery, he recalled that all he had wanted to do was “to match the Nick I had been before the diagnosis.” The goal was to maintain his prior speed, not exceed it. He recalls, “I hadn’t been able to run a fast marathon in the past because I hadn’t wanted to. Or, more precisely, I hadn’t really cared about going that fast because all I really wanted was something else.”  

Within a year, Thompson had broken his own record in the New York City Marathon by five minutes and then exceeded his highest expectations for the next seven races. He has done so despite training “only” 65 to 70 miles a week, far less than the mileage of a professional marathoner.  

Thompson muses about the reasons for his success—perhaps his body responds to training better than others’, and he has been remarkably free of injuries—but it is hard to escape the conclusion that he simply works harder and smarter than most. To lean on a cliché, Thompson reminds us that we can do hard things. He runs even in the most miserable weather, and regardless of the location—he has run through Times Square at midnight, through cities to the airport, and to black-tie events with a tuxedo tucked in his backpack. He runs despite aches and pains, nausea and fatigue. “The deeper truth,” he reminds readers, is that “you have to learn to run when you hurt, and you have to learn to hurt when you run.”  

Thompson’s own pre-race rituals and preparation offer a window into his own intensity and the arcana of the sport, in which an improvement of just a few seconds can be meaningful. For instance, before each race, Thompson pays careful attention to his feet, clipping his toenails, shaving the hairs on his toes, and applying Vaseline. As an ultramarathoner, he has taught himself to urinate while running. 

The reader is left craving more such details, both about the sport—for instance, that it is tradition for a record-breaker to drink champagne from his sweaty running shoe—and also the ways it has impacted Thompson’s professional life. The reader who comes to this memoir with a familiarity with Thompson’s storied career and reputation for a relentless work ethic and talent for untangling knotty problems will be disappointed by the virtual absence of workplace anecdotes. While he describes his major career pivots (and the long, contemplative runs he often takes while weighing his options), Thompson writes in a too-broad fashion about the ways in which running has improved his professional life. For example, he muses, “I had learned that our minds create limits for us when we’re afraid of failure, not because it’s actually time to slow or stop.” The memoir is filled with similar axioms about the instructive lessons from running, like teaching concentration, the value of discipline, and the need for setting goals, but is disappointingly light on specifics about the impacts on his own professional life.  

Thompson’s prose is lean and spare, like the strides of a runner. At times, he veers into inspirational cliché, but at its best, the writing is almost Zen-like, when he captures the quality of running in nature, perfectly in sync with the rhythm of each step. He describes being so in touch with his body’s rhythms that he can run a mile and, without glancing at his watch, predict the time within a second or two. While most of Thompson’s training is on mundane urban courses, including his daily eight-mile round trip commute, his description of runs among the mountains of New England exude sheer joy: “To run through the Andover bird sanctuary in October is to cross into a Winslow Homer painting. The palette changes subtly each day as the maple trees flip from green to scarlet while the oak trees stubbornly hold on to their russet leaves.” 

Thompson intersperses his own narrative with five excellent chapters profiling other exceptional long-distance runners. The profiles interrupt the biographical flow of the memoir, but they are among the most compelling stories in the book and serve as a reminder that not all runners are motivated by a competitive drive.  

The most interesting of those profiled is Suprabha Beckjord, a world-record-holding ultramarathoner. For 13 years, Beckjord completed the 3,100-mile Self-Transcendence Race, organized by the Indian guru Sri Chinmoy. This astonishing race course—a distance greater than from San Francisco to New York—consists simply of circumnavigating around a public high school occupying a single square block in Queens, New York. Successful runners complete approximately 60 miles per day—day after day, for nearly two months—throughout the hot New York City summer. For Beckjord, the race is one of spiritual transcendence and self-awareness, and the mundane course offers an opportunity to notice the tiniest variations in one’s surroundings—an insect on a tree, a subtle change in the weather, a chip in the sidewalk. 

The Running Ground crackles with big ideas, about intergenerational inheritance, the power of love and forgiveness, the inevitability of aging, the mind-body connection, and the value of hard work. The memoir’s intertwined stories—Thompson’s relationship with his father alongside Thompson’s own journey as a marathon runner hitting his stride midlife—are compelling narratives. There is so much of interest in this lean, slim memoir. The downside is that Thompson races toward the finish line, without offering sufficient time to fully explore each of these individual themes. He writes, “One can run as a way to seek spiritual awakening, and one can run to fulfill ambition. It’s often hard to do both.” Perhaps a memoir, too, is best written as a journey of spiritual awakening, a meandering journey of self-knowledge, rather than a sprint to conclusion.