CEO Nicholas Thompson on how running helped him find his footing

One of the first things you realize about Nick Thompson is just how busy he is, as CEO of The Atlantic; as a public speaker; and on top of it all, as a family man. But he is also a world-class long-distance runner. 

He ran to the office on the day we talked. “I did, of course,” he said.

“Why do you like it?” I asked.

“Every time I go running, I’m opening my mind up, I’m engaging with nature,” he said. “I have a chance to think. I like to have my body in motion. It’s a break from the rest of life. It’s something I’ve always loved.”

And if you can imagine, Thompson has actually gotten faster as he’s gotten older, shaving 14 minutes off his best marathon time at 44 – and just this year, posting the fastest 50-mile time in the world for his age group. 

If you’re wondering how he does it, and why, he explains in “The Running Ground” – part memoir, part call to the runner in all of us.

“Everybody can run,” he said. “Go to Prospect Park, right, and look at the incredible, beautiful variety. Short people, tall people, really skinny people, wide people. Everybody can run. Humans were made to run.”

Thompson says he started running because his father was a runner. “There was always energy and chaos and life around him,” he said. “He never slowed down, he never stopped.”

But in a life of great professional success – teaching and working in both the Ford and Reagan administrations – Scott Thompson also suffered personal turmoil.

Thompson writes that one of his father’s refrains was to tell him that his life is going to crack apart when he turns 40. “He told me that all the time,” he said. “You know, his father, his life had gotten much harder and kind of fallen apart at 40. And then my dad felt that his life had kind of fallen apart at 40.”

Scott left the family when Nick was just a kid, and then struggled with just about everything. “He was an alcoholic and he was a sex addict,” said Thompson. “But he wasn’t a mean drunk, a fall-over drunk. He just drank way too much. And then in his later life, after he came out of the closet – in his 40s and 50s, 60s, 70s – he had a terrible problem with sex addiction.”

For Nick, running became both a way to be like his father, while also rejecting the chaos that followed him. “In some ways, running is a way of mourning him after he passed away,” he said. “I also am well aware that he could not control his emotions. He could not control what he did during the course of a day. I felt like one of the ways I could prevent that from happening to me was to run, that running gave me discipline through the rest of my life.”

So, Thompson ran. He ran in high school, and briefly in college at Stanford. And after a break, he picked it up again in his late 20s, which is when he got the news: “I had just run my first really good marathon and felt on top of the world. And it’s two weeks later, the next week I go in and see the doctor and he is like, ‘I feel something.'”

It turned out to be thyroid cancer. “I was diagnosed when I was 30 years old and it was just a shock,” he said.

Shocking as it was, it was treatable, and it gave Thompson a new goal. He said, “One of the reasons I kept marathoning in my 30s and in my 40s was because I wanted to feel like the person I had been before I got sick.”

As he got faster, his career took off, too. He joined Condé Nast, where he would eventually become editor of newyorker.com and editor-in-chief of Wired. Longtime viewers of “Sunday Morning” may remember he even reported for this show, in stories on QAnon, the 2020 election, and Wikipedia.

I asked, “Do you think you’d be where you are professionally without running?”

“Definitely not,” he replied. “I think running has been a great tool professionally. It is a way for me to add discipline to my days, for me to have time where my mind can just wander, where I can think through things.”

But for Thompson, now 50, what’s really unexpected is what happened next. He is faster today than he was at age 35. “I like to think of it as the aging process as a moving sidewalk, you know, pushing you backwards, right? Like, every year I get a little bit weaker. But you can do things to kind of move forward faster than the moving sidewalk is going backwards. You can figure out how to train more intelligently. You can get a better understanding of your body. You can eat differently.”

Which is not to say that’s it’s easy.

I asked, “If you’re trying to encourage people to run, why do you post from time to time pictures of yourself looking in absolute agony? Like crossing a finish line? I mean, terrible photos. Some of the all-time worst anyone’s ever put out in public voluntarily!”

“So, that race was really hard,” he said. “It was the Lake Waramaug 50-miler, and I wanted to set the American record for my age group. And I was on pace through 45, 46 miles. And then the last few miles, I knew I was gonna be close, and so I was pushing so hard. I was just … hurting so much everywhere. But I still won the race. I still ran the fastest time in the world this year. It was still like a pretty good result.”

Running continues to be a family tradition for the Thompsons. Nick runs with his own three sons, and coaches weekly track sessions with his youngest son’s soccer team. He said, “It feels like full circle to have learned the sport from my father when I was about 5 or 6, and now being able to pass it to my children – James is 11, Zachary’s 15, Ellis is 17. It’s a great thing. And there’s all these other kids!”

And as it turns out, life hasn’t fallen apart like his father warned.

“You’ve kind of done it!” I said.

“Well, I mean, I keep going because I enjoy it, right?” Thompson laughed. “I keep running because, you know, my life didn’t fall apart at 40 ’cause I didn’t lose my discipline at 40, but could still fall apart at 50, which I just turned. And so, I don’t wanna let it go. The really interesting transition in my life will be at some point I won’t be able to do this, and then I’ll have to figure out how else to hold on.”

READ AN EXCERPT: “The Running Ground” by Nicholas Thompson

      
For more info:

      
Story produced by Wonbo Woo. Editor: Jennifer Falk.