Running is the simplest of sports: right foot, left foot, right foot. But the simplicity opens up complexity. There's no ball to focus on, no mat to land on, no one charging toward you with their shoulder down. And so your attention shifts inward. As you run, you're just you—right foot and left foot, nature and nurture, whatever goes on in your mind.
My relationship to the sport begins in Bacone, Oklahoma, in the mid-1940s. My father, Scott Thompson, grew up there as the shy, misfit son of a domineering Baptist minister. Frank Thompson, or Granddad, was an imposing oak of a man with eyebrows the size of muskrats. He was a Golden Gloves boxing champion and wanted his only son to obsess about sports, but my father was uncoordinated and athletically indifferent. He wanted to read books and listen to The Marriage of Figaro. Eventually, my dad escaped his unhappy home for boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts. He applied in secret, paying the application fees with money he earned on his paper route. He did well there and won a scholarship to Stanford and a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. His friends from that time remember him as a flurry of energy, wit, and charisma. After meeting my father on campus in 1960, John F. Kennedy was quoted in The Saturday Evening Post that Scotty Thompson might make it to the White House before he did.
After he completed his studies, my father married my mother and began an adult life of constant motion, ambition, and enthusiasm. He barely slept; he began publishing books and became a tenured professor; he made plans to run for office. But he also started drinking too much, smoking too much, going out too much. By the time he was closing in on 40—an age, he would often say, when all men's lives fall apart—he needed some discipline in the fermented mayhem of his days. As he would later tell me, running was the rare sport where you mostly competed against yourself. You could learn without having to lose. It was also something he hadn't failed at in front of his father.
In 1980, when my dad started putting on his running shoes, I was 5, and naturally, I wanted to tag along. I remember him driving his car around the block where we lived just outside of Boston with his eye on the odometer. Start at the front door by the boxwoods, turn left and left again. Go two full loops around the block; on the third, stop at the gate in the fence just past the beech tree. That's 1 mile. I remember the triumph of running the whole thing by his side. He was obsessed with his physical appearance, and he would teach me to do push-ups in the backyard and sit-ups with a round metal weight he kept under the bed. He began to race too. On my bedroom wall I have a photo from around that time of him running a 5-mile road race in Maine. He's wearing a red Lacoste polo shirt and socks that could stretch to his knees but are squished down at his ankles.
Two years later I went to New York to watch him run a marathon. My parents had divorced by then, and my father had moved to Washington, DC. He had a good job—but he hadn't exactly followed the path of John Kennedy. He was an associate director at the United States Information Agency, which meant he promoted Ronald Reagan's Cold War policies to the world. He lived in Dupont Circle and alternated runs of 12 and 6 miles every morning. He had gotten good. I searched for him in the sea of sweaty people in short shorts coming down the Queensboro Bridge. He spotted me and hustled to the side. I handed him a cup of orange juice and gave him a new pair of shoes. He gulped, laced up, smiled, and hurried along. His goal was to finish in under three hours, and he came close: 3:01:19. I didn't have much sense of how the sport worked—or, for that matter, how physical pain or time worked—and for years I would wonder why he just hadn't sprinted at the end.
After the race he pledged to go faster in the next one. But life wasn't going to work that way. My father soon came out as gay. Not long after that he tested positive for HIV. It was the start of the plague years for that disease. Running faster wasn't much of a priority anymore.
I started running for real at age 15, not long after being cut from the tryouts for the sophomore basketball team at Andover, my father's alma mater. My self-confidence was at a nadir. I was pimply, nerdy, and, for the first time, living away from the love and support of my mother, who had heroically raised my two sisters and me after my father moved away. I was overmatched and trapped in a place where I didn't yet feel at home. One memory sticks in my mind as a metaphor for that time: I was in the dining room of a house on campus one afternoon, quietly preparing for a biology test, when one of my dormmates—a star on the football team—started making out with someone against the other side of the main door out.
Sophomores were required to play sports, and indoor track was still accepting castaways. So I wandered over and told the coach I wanted to join. He sent me off with the boys running the 2-mile, and, for my first few races, I completed the 21 loops around the oval in just under 12 minutes, putting me right about average. My coach, though, saw potential and entered me in the New England Prep School championships. And then, on a magical day in February 1991, at a school called Moses Brown, I discovered a gear I didn't know I had.
The track was an unfamiliar size, so I didn't have context for the times they announced after each lap. I wondered if there had been an error when the time for the first mile was called—5:25, by far my fastest ever. I finished in fifth place in a class-record time of 10 minutes and 48 seconds. The football star read about it in the school paper and congratulated me. I had practiced reasonably hard, but you don't set records because of two months of doing the same workouts as everyone else. Clearly, my genes had played a role.
My father, meanwhile, had been given the most valuable mulligan one can get. A year after his diagnosis, he'd entered into a study of HIV-positive men, only to be informed that his initial diagnosis had been incorrect; he was HIV-free. Years later, he would tell me that the initial death sentence was what had enabled him to live. Until he was forced to confront what dying would actually mean, his sexual choices had been reckless. His days of competitive running, though, were behind him. By the time I picked up the sport in high school, he was in his early fifties, and his back, his knees, and his constantly blackened toenails wouldn't let him go for more than a few miles. He was a man who liked to do things all in or not at all. He put his running shoes away.
Boys improve more or less linearly at running until they turn into men. If you train steadily, your hormones work in concert with your muscles. Add increasing self-confidence to the mix and you get a positive feedback loop: Speed leads to confidence leads to speed. By my senior year, I was a New England prep school track champion and headed off to Stanford and the Pac-10. But the pattern of improvement only holds if you stay healthy. The summer before I started college, I increased my weekly running miles from about 35 to about 70. My legs got stronger, but then they frayed. I showed up on campus with a stress fracture in my shin expecting to run cross-country races. A few months later, just as I was gingerly trying to train again, a doctor told me I had mononucleosis. The next summer I swam in polluted water and came down with hepatitis. I knew something was wrong when, on a run in the woods of Northeast Harbor, Maine, I stopped by a bed of moss and saw my pee had turned black.
Quitting the team was hard, but not running was easy. I convinced myself that the focus required by Division I sports would have narrowed the aperture of my college imagination. With no track practice, I had time for a million other things, including playing acoustic guitar. And so the fall after graduation, I moved to a farm in New Hampshire to concentrate on music.
At some point that summer, though, sitting by a granite stone wall and feeling lonely, I decided to try racing again. I was reaching inside myself because there was less going on outside. The realization that I wasn't good enough at guitar to make it my life was hitting me. There was no distraction of friends and parties and classes. I needed something to do. What I came up with was taking my father's goal and making it my own: run a three-hour marathon. I even asked him to do it with me, but he demurred. My training consisted of running a few days a week and strolling through sugar maples on the others. I was clueless. I entered a marathon in Providence and ended up struggling fitfully across the line in 3:18.
For the next decade, I trained episodically and entered marathons now and then while beginning a journalism career that had me moving every few years—from New Hampshire to West Africa to Washington, DC, to New Haven. I dropped out of one marathon at mile 23 because my knee hurt. My father, who loved my new hobby, was left waiting at the finish. I missed another when, driving with my father down to southern Virginia, we got a flat tire the morning of the race. The fastest I ran was a 3:07 in Maryland the year of the sniper. As I hit my late twenties, the three-hour goal seemed impossible.
But then I bought a book called Advanced Marathoning and learned the fundamentals of the sport. It really does help to run more than 20 miles multiple times. It really does help to run at least six days a week, and on some of those days to run until you hurt. Finally, on a loop course in Delaware, at the age of 29, I ran a 2:57. My father ordered a blown-up picture of me crossing the finish line. That summer, I moved to New York City and joined the Central Park Track Club. Six months later, in the New York City Marathon, I ran a 2:43, finishing 146th out of 37,000. I wasn't elite, but I was getting close to what runners call “sub-elite”: that category of person who wins Dick's Sporting Goods gift certificates at local road races.
I felt fit and healthy. I was 30 and newly married to a woman I'd fallen in love with in college. She'd moved to New York after graduation to begin a dual career as a professional dancer and a professor of dance. We were finally living in the same place. I was starting a great job as an editor at WIRED and writing a book. My father, meanwhile, had begun to unravel. He had stalled professionally, and wherever he went he carried pages of the half-finished manuscripts he'd written—histories, novels, memoirs, erotica. He'd begun, too, to obsess about sex and spent many hours a day chatting on gay hookup sites. He would quote Carl Jung and say he was unburdening himself of a repressed youth. He had fallen four years behind on his taxes.
After the New York Marathon, I got a physical. The doctor went through the usual steps. My heart rate was low, my reflexes were fine. Then he put his hands on my neck and found a small lump. I'd have to come in for more tests. My father used to say, “He whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make promising,” a variation on a quote from antiquity that he thought explained the darker moments of his life. Bad news hits hardest when things are going well.
I'd put off the physical because my right knee had been aching, and I didn't want to hear orders not to race. That worry came to seem comical as the reports got ever worse. My doctor told me that they'd need to do a sonogram and then a tissue biopsy. Next came the news that I needed surgery: An aptly named Dr. Cutter would have to slice open my neck to figure out what this little lump really was. The first surgery revealed my diagnosis: thyroid cancer. A second surgery followed. I was then given a radioactive pill and sent into our apartment for a weeklong quarantine. My wife would drop soup off at the door.
My variant of thyroid cancer was eminently treatable, and in the months that followed I recovered slowly. At first, I would step out of my apartment and struggle to walk the one block uphill from my apartment, in Brooklyn, to Prospect Park. But in due course I could walk anywhere, and eventually run. One glorious day, I both ran 10 miles and talked optimistically with my wife about having children. Fitness came back faster than I expected. Nine months after the diagnosis, I ran 15 slow miles in the mountains of Aspen, Colorado, and burst into tears as I came down from the last peak. Six months after that, I ran three times around the circular drive in Prospect Park, finishing first in a 10-mile race, my first win since high school. Soon I was back to my old marathon training routine. In November 2007, I ran the New York City Marathon 13 seconds faster than I had in 2005, right before my diagnosis.
Over the next 10 years, I ran and ran and ran. I entered 10 marathons and finished almost all of them between 2:42 and 2:46. Most years, I ran in New York, but after the race was canceled because of Hurricane Sandy, I entered the flatter Philadelphia Marathon and crossed the line in 2:39. In all these races, the only consistency was the finish. In some I started much too fast, in others I started much too slow. I slept well before some races. One year I headed to the starting line after pulling a near all-nighter bouncing our then 3-month-old—the second of three sons who would form our family—on my knees.
In January 2017, I started a new job as the editor in chief of this magazine. My father sent a long email about how proud he was. By that time he had moved to Asia and slowly squandered his money. With each new financial calamity, he would decamp to ever-poorer regions so that he could still live as he had in his former life. Now he was in the Philippines, by a lake in Batangas Province, almost literally the farthest place from Bacone, Oklahoma. He said he was healthy. In an email, he wrote, “I hope to send good news of sound body (indeed the cardiologist usually bitches at his nurse for bringing x-rays of a 55-year-old man). Marathons were a good investment.”
Two weeks later, he suffered a heart attack. He had no chance to get to a hospital and died at age 75. He was felled by the same cause and at about the same age as his own father. I traveled to the Philippines to bury him. In his bedroom, I found a poem I'd written in the second grade about watching him run down the Queensboro Bridge.
I used to think of athletic ability as a mountain. You're born at the base, and you'll die there too. In between, you climb higher and higher until you begin to descend. But that analogy isn't quite right, because as you get older you acquire wisdom that can help you train. I've come to realize that a better analogy is of rolling peaks. You go up, you go down. At some point you reach your peak, but there are still vistas as you descend.
One year after my father's death, in the spring of 2018, when I was 42, I got a call from Nike. They were looking for people to train under elite coaches, a moon shot program ultimately aimed at testing and promoting their new products. (Yes, I do understand why the editor of a magazine that covers technology and gear might have been selected by a company that makes gear and technology.) Did I want to participate? My race times had been consistently slower for roughly five years. Of course I did.
As I wrote in a story in WIRED in 2018, I was soon equipped with a heart-rate monitor on my arm, a balance monitor on my waistband, and sensors on my shoes that measured pronation and force. I started doing hard, structured workouts of a type I had never done on my own, and I had the oxygen consumption rate of my blood tested at Nike's lab in Portland. I drank beet juice every morning because studies have shown that high-nitrate foods can boost cardiovascular endurance. I started to log every workout publicly in Strava. In October of that year, I crossed the finish line in Chicago in 2:38, my best time ever.
Very few people quit running after a personal best. You want to get faster, until you realize you can't. And so, after Chicago, I began a quest to understand how much of our limits are physical, how much are mental, and how much they exist in some region in between. I had improved at an age when humans were supposed to stop improving. Now I kept thinking about all those races over the years when I hadn't improved. Why had I only once managed a marathon in under 2:40? And if that wasn't my limit, how about 2:30? Perhaps 7-year-old Nick was correct. Maybe Dad could have sped up at the end.
And so, in the spirit of experimentation, I decided to see if I could run fast marathons back to back. One of the great mysteries of running is the level of effort that breaks you. To a point, going harder makes you stronger, like blowing air into a tire that gets ever firmer. But there's a limit, and when you cross it the tire pops. Your muscles collapse and your motivation falters. Each marathon made me feel like a rag doll. It could take months before I was ready to run hard again. But maybe, I thought, this year would be different. Perhaps there was air left in the tire for running the New York City Marathon just three weeks after Chicago.
My two older boys had come to cheer me on in Chicago, but the youngest one, then 4, had stayed in New York. I had a feeling that I would never be this fast again, and I wanted him to see me running well too. Parents can never know for sure what will inspire their kids or scar them, and few people are better at seeing through our vanities and pretensions than our children. Still, at the very least, he would get a sense of this thing I do when I put on my running shoes.
On the first Sunday in November, I trekked to the world's most inconvenient major marathon: subway to ferry to bus to security queue. At the crammed starting line, I stood stretching my ankles and my neck—the only parts of the body you can loosen when packed hip-to-hip. The gun went off and everything proceeded smoothly. Eight miles in, right before Barclays Center, I swerved to the right to grab Gu gels from my kids. I felt in control and surprisingly calm as I passed through Williamsburg and then down the Queensboro Bridge at mile 16. At the 22-mile marker at Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem, I felt great. My last 4 miles were by far the fastest of my race. For the second time in a month, I crossed the finish in 2:38.
I'd passed some psychological barrier, and probably a physical one too. I'd also been aided by tech. I had worn Nike's new Vaporfly shoes since nearly the moment they'd come out: first for a 2:43 in New York, and then for both my 2:38s. But the biggest tech aid might have been the heart-rate monitor on my arm. (I've tried several wrist heart-rate monitors, but they always give me a data muddle; chest-heart monitors feel like a girdle.) The screen of my Garmin watch displayed two numbers: my heart rate and my pace. I tracked my data in every hard workout and got feedback via text message from my new coaches, who would scan the numbers I uploaded and track the workout reports I put in a Google doc. Marathons are all about energy conservation. It's important to stay calm, and in both marathons I'd followed a very specific rule: For the first 20 miles, if I started running faster than six minutes per mile, or if my heart rate jumped above 145, I needed to slow. After mile 20, I could go as hard as I wanted. And in those last 4 miles of the New York race, it was the data that had given me the confidence to push it to a roughly 5:45 mile pace.
Now I was exhausted. Every muscle was sore, and my body felt like a Jenga tower with half the blocks removed. I rested for two months, and then I wrote to Stephen Finley, the head of the Brooklyn Track Club. He had trained me, through the summer, as part of the Nike moon shot program, and we'd become friends. I wanted to get faster still. Would he help? Of course, he said.
The first thing Finley said to do was keep up my regular routines, with a little more intensity. When I'm in New York, I wake up at the same time, eat the same breakfast (oatmeal and nuts), and run 4 miles to the office. At the end of the day, I run home.
Finley created a plan in a Google doc to help me, and I began following the routine in earnest as the winter in New York started to bear down. Before Chicago, I had run an average of 55 to 60 miles a week, roughly half of what a professional marathoner does. By February 2019, I was up to 65 to 70 miles. Twice a week, I would do speed workouts. These might be short and fast (eight repeats of 1,000 meters hard, with rest in between) or longer and slower (three repeats of a 2-mile circuit, with rest in between). Occasionally I would run without shoes to strengthen my feet and to remind myself about posture. There was the occasional hitch. Traveling for work in Abu Dhabi, I was stymied by sand and wind. When I got back I tried to do a long run in Prospect Park at night, and somewhere on the far side of the park I pulled over by a water fountain and almost fell asleep on the ground next to a raccoon. Another day, I took my Vaporflys to the local track at the start of a snowstorm. The first-generation Vaporflys were good for many things, but they had the traction of a spoon wrapped in a banana peel. My marks in the snow were roughly left foot, right foot, left foot, butt print, arm print, left foot, right foot, butt print.
During the previous training cycle, I fell apart every time I ran a mile under five minutes and 35 seconds. Then, one day, I was racing down the drive in Prospect Park, drafting behind a guy riding a cargo bike. “Dude, how fast you going?” he asked. I looked down and was stunned to tell him I was running a 5:25 mile. He gave me a thumbs-up and let me keep drafting.
The real test came in April, at the Boston Marathon, a slow, hilly course. I set my goals cautiously. Just maybe, I could break 2:35. But a smart marathoner has a private goal and a public goal. I told everyone I was trying to break 2:37:12, a marathon run at exactly a six-minute pace, which my high school cross-country coach had once told me was the cutoff time for a real runner.
The gun went off, and everything flowed just fine. I ticked off the early downhill miles exactly on target. I felt nothing more than the normal marathoner's paranoia: At one point I became obsessed with the idea that my right shoe was tied too tightly. The hills passed much sooner than I expected. As the course turned right near the church I'd gone to as a kid, and about 2 miles from the boxwoods by my old home, my mother hollered words of encouragement. Soon I was racing downhill toward Kenmore Square. I ran mile 22 in 5:27 and finished the race in a new personal record of 2:34. Later, the Abbott World Marathon Majors emailed with the delightful news that my times in Boston and Chicago had made me the 29th-ranked marathoner over 40 in the world.
After I finished Boston, I found myself thinking of my father. He would have been proud. He always had a belief that I could do pretty much anything, even when it wasn't warranted. In high school, I was a mediocre but enthusiastic actor; I wanted the part of Rosencrantz in the school production of Hamlet and was disappointed not to be cast at all. My father said that if the drama director had any sense, he would have cast me as the lead. His confidence never waned. Shortly before his death, he sent a long email. “Reread the 24th book of the Iliad, where the gods throw ashes on some and gold on others,” he wrote. His reading of the poem was a bit off, but his message came through: I had a wonderful wife and family and was doing OK. “Destiny, and you got all gold,” he wrote. Perhaps his praise was an attempt to reverse the way his father had treated him. Still, what more can a child ask than that their parents have faith in them?
The math about how to get better at running, at least at a first approximation, is fairly simple. There's the body's fitness: how efficiently you can uptake oxygen and move it to your muscles. Then there's your running economy: mainly how efficient you are at moving oxygen while at a given speed. And then there's how much you weigh. To improve the first two factors, you run harder and smarter and avoid getting hurt. To decrease your mass, you eat more spinach and less ice cream.
So why do runners have limits? And why do the limits differ from one person to the next? In part, it's because of physiological factors: blood oxygen levels, lactate, muscular strength, each of which has a genetic component. But there's another theory, put forward by a sports physiologist named Tim Noakes. As he puts it, in what he calls the central governor model, part of the reason we slow is because our brain is telling our body to stop because it's scared. It doesn't want you to overheat or develop a stress fracture in your shin, so it preemptively hits the brakes. If Noakes' theory is right, it implies a mind-body dilemma. We all can go faster. We just have to persuade our brains not to start the subconscious shutdown process right away. But the only thing we can use to trick our brain is our brain. Training becomes a game of hide-and-seek with oneself. When I think back to that day on the Moses Brown track, I wonder whether I could have run as fast had I known my early pace. If I'd realized how fast I was going, my brain might have shut down.
This suggests a subtle sneaky brilliance to Finley's workouts. He constantly had me running 400-meter repeats, or even 200-meter repeats. Why? To make my legs stronger. But also to familiarize my body and mind with faster paces and to make me less scared of my watch. If you've run a 4:40 pace for any distance, you feel a bit less anxious seeing a 5:32 pace on your watch in a 10-mile race. He couldn't, though, tell me this. He needed to help one part of my brain hide while the other half was learning to seek.
After I'd recovered from Boston, I talked with Finley about a new goal: breaking 2 hours and 30 minutes in Chicago in the coming fall. He methodically planned workouts to slowly shift my physiology and my psychology too. I kept a Google doc in which Finley would plot everything out, like: “6x 1 mile w/ 90 sec rest start at 5:50, 5:45, 5:40, 5:30, 5:25, 5:20.” Every Tuesday, I would run long, hard repeats. Every Thursday, I would run short, even harder ones. Every Sunday, I'd run long but not hard.
We slow down because we get older and our bodies break down. But I'm convinced we slow also because our days fill up. My job involves an endless series of crises and impossible dilemmas; parenting three kids is pretty much the same. There isn't remotely the time I had for hobbies in, say, my twenties. My best friend since nursery school—a professional trumpet player—has wryly pointed out that the years I've run fast are the years I haven't written any decent music.
Fortunately, running is a great hobby for busy people, because it doesn't take that much time. The sport is simple, so there are no plays or intricate moves to learn. And it's grueling, which means your body can only take so much. An elite tennis player might spend 40 hours a week on the court. An elite runner's schedule might take 12. During my most intense training weeks, I'm running for around eight hours total. That's a lot of time. But more than half of that time comes from commuting. I drop my kids at school and then run into Manhattan. I finish work, run home to Brooklyn, and arrive by 7 pm, My wife or our nanny has picked up the kids and started the evening routine. My Sunday morning long runs often start before the children wake up. My wife, having spent her life in dance, appreciates the value of my physical training—though she understandably prefers me to be back from these long runs at 7:30, not 8:00.
Sometimes I think that everything in life would be easier if I just put my shoes away. But more often I think the opposite. With a stressful job, it's helpful to have just a little bit of time where you force yourself to go outside and breathe. And I've come to believe that discipline in one part of my life makes it easier to have discipline in another part of life. Maybe my rather hard job would become even harder if I weren't running. Maybe my father could have held it all together if he'd just started running a little earlier.
In the days after my father died, I wrote a letter to my own children about him. It stretched to roughly the length of this essay. I'll give it to them when they're older. I want them to understand a man they knew only in his frail, harum-scarum last stages of life. I also wrote it for myself, of course. As the people I love the most know, I've spent my life both following my father and trying to avoid becoming him. I share his genes for running, and large parts of his personality. But genes that make one susceptible to alcoholism are inherited too. As for the King Lear madness at the end? It was nature, nurture, and circumstance. I'm approaching the age when it began for him.
I sent an early version of this essay to my older sister, who saw something clearly that I hadn't identified yet. “Running solved nothing for [Dad]. You've had a longer journey with it, and used it in ways that are much more productive. But I have this nagging sense that your story of needing to follow footsteps (the schools, the running) and needing so much not to follow footsteps (the overindulgence, the flameout, the irresponsibility and failure) are more complexly interwoven.”
The morning of the 2019 Chicago Marathon, I drowned myself in beet juice and, lacking utensils, used the knife on a hotel corkscrew to spread peanut butter on a bagel. I hydrated with water, dehydrated with coffee, and hydrated again. Then I made my way to the start. Finley came, and he, my oldest son, and my younger sister and her kids positioned themselves on the course to strategically hand me water and energy gels. I spent some of the time before the race obsessing about the fact that I had brought two socks of slightly different sizes, but mostly I felt confident. If the day was perfect, 2:30 was possible.
Then the gun went off and everything went haywire. The skyscrapers of Chicago intoxicated my GPS, and my heart-rate monitor was in its cups too. Finley wanted me to run the first half at 5:45 per mile. I wanted my heart rate to be under 140. But about three-quarters of a mile in, my watch said I was running a 4:40 pace and my heart rate was 169. I passed the first mile, adrift without my technological crutches—a zoo animal dropped back into the wild. But then I saw the clock at the first mile marker: 5:45 on the nose. For the next 3 miles, my pace stayed the same. My watch was drunk, but I was holding steady. At times, as in all races, I felt exhausted, confused, and wanted to puke or drop out. But mostly I just tried to breathe, relax, and think about as little as possible.
I passed the half in 1:14:59 and then picked up the pace a touch. By mile 22, part of my brain was celebrating that I would likely beat 2:30, and the other half was delineating all the things that could yet go wrong. Then, at mile 25, I tried to accelerate and suddenly felt as if I were running in boots made of concrete.
I felt momentary panic, the kind you get when your car first starts to skid on ice. But then I steadied myself and tried to concentrate on my breathing and a meditative pattern I sometimes use while running—counting out patterns of three as my feet hit the pavement. One, two, three. Right foot, left foot, right foot. One, two, three. Left, right, left. I thought about posture and trying to keep relaxed from the base of my skull to my heel, and from my cheekbones to my toes. I reminded myself that it didn't matter if I ended in a sprint, as long as I didn't end in a crawl.
Hitting my goal meant running a marathon in 9,000 seconds, and I crossed the line with just 47 to spare: 2:29:13. Only one person older than me went faster that day. My family sent texts full of emojis and love. Finley came running to congratulate me, to celebrate, and to reveal that, having seen me the week before, and toward the end of the race, he'd worried I'd pushed it too far. For the first time, he said, I had looked like I was truly exhausted. I'd made it. I'd done it. But now it was time to stop for a while.
At my father's funeral, one of his friends told me a story from their college days. My amateur-boxer grandfather, Frank Thompson, had come to visit the campus. When my father introduced him to his friend, my grandfather said, “I wish I had a son as strong and handsome as you.” My father had spent his life trying to escape his taller, stronger father. Granddad's desire that his son be good at sports had led his son to entirely reject sports. In fact, my father often said decades later that he was only able to run truly fast once Granddad died. And it was, indeed, two years after Frank Thompson's death that Scott Thompson ran a marathon personal best, that day in New York City when Nick Thompson handed him shoes and a cup of orange juice.
I've thought about my dad's comment a lot as I've considered why people get faster, or why I ran just under 2:44 at age 30, and just under 2:30 at age 44. We get faster because we train harder and improve the capacity of our mitochondria to manage oxygen. We get faster because we accumulate wisdom and stick to routines. And we get faster, too, because we break barriers in our minds that we don't know exist—and probably couldn't cross if we knew they did.
Part of the reason I got faster was technology—the shoes, the sensors, and even the Google doc that kept me on track. Part of it was focused coaching, which led to focused training and focused recovery. Maybe there are things that my sons, several decades from now, will understand that aren't apparent to me now. But today I think the reason I kept failing to break 2:40 in my thirties was that I didn't want to.
The cancer diagnosis I got the year I turned 30 made me feel mortal for the first time, and it was terrifying. I was convinced that, even if I survived—as I surely would—something else awful would be found the next time a doctor put his hands on my neck. I worked in WIRED's offices, which were then in Times Square, and I would run-commute home to Brooklyn down the Hudson River bike path. I'm not a person who usually stops during a run, but one evening, after the diagnosis but before the surgeries, I pulled over somewhere just south of Chelsea Piers and stared grimly out over the cold Hudson River. I hadn't had children yet, and I worried I never would. I was young, but felt as if I was slipping down the mountain. I stood there for maybe half an hour, before, slowly and stumbling, I began again to run back home. I've thought about that moment, and about what it meant to be sick, during probably every marathon I've run since.
Might that have been why I was stuck at 2:40 for so long? Maybe I didn't spend my thirties racing the clock; maybe I spent them racing myself as I'd been before I got sick. I was utterly content to stay even with that person for as long as I could. I was just happy to be free of cancer, to be able to do something that proved not only that I was still alive but also that the cancer hadn't slowed me down.
At some point I'll stop. Maybe, in fact, the fall of 2019 was the peak of my running life. I broke 2:30 and will forever, in the eyes of my children, have been momentarily fast. I even helped inspire one of them—the 3-month-old I once bounced on my knee through the night, now age 9—to do his own training. Two weeks after Chicago, he and I completed the 3.35-mile lap of Prospect Park together. I worry, of course, whether I might just be creating a burden for him. We give our children our genes and our love, and we don't have any idea of what, in the end, they'll do with them. My grandfather scarred my father by trying to push him into sports; my father inspired me by taking me running around the block. Maybe one of my sons will write a tell-all one day about the pressure his father put on him to be something he didn't want to be. Or maybe they'll find that they love the sport too, and I'll end up drinking beet juice with my grandkids.
I started talking to Finley again and made another Google doc, with its relentless schedule of Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday. Can I go faster in my next marathon? I don't know, but I'll certainly try. All three of my kids, though, are realistic about what it means to try to get faster as the body gets weaker every day. They are excited about what they'll feel like at 18 or 28. They're climbing up the mountain as I'm walking down.
In the taxi to the airport after Chicago, I asked my 11-year-old son what my next goal should be.
“2:35,” he said.
“2:35?” I asked in surprise, thinking perhaps he had meant 10 minutes faster.
“You think you're going to run that fast again?” came the response, with wide eyes and a perfect grin.
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NICHOLAS THOMPSON (@nxthompson) is the editor in chief of WIRED.
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