An upcoming book to be published by Penguin Random House.

Autorentext

Nicholas Thompson

Klappentext

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A profound meditation on what running can teach us about our limits and our lives by a record-setting distance runner who is now the CEO of The Atlantic.

“This is not just an engaging memoir about running. It’s a meditation on what it takes to marshal and maintain motivation.”—ADAM GRANT, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Potential and Think Again

“Endlessly surprising, revelatory, and heart-rending.”—ANNA WINTOUR

For Nicholas Thompson, running has always been about something more than putting one foot in front of another. He ran his first mile at age five, using it as a way to connect with his father as his family fell apart. As a young man, it was a sport that transformed, and then shook, his sense of self-worth. In his 30s, it was a way of coping with a profound medical scare.

By his early 40s, Thompson had many accomplishments. He was the Editor in Chief of a major magazine; a devoted husband and father; and a passionate runner. But he was haunted by the recent death of his brilliant, complicated father and the crack-up that derailed his father’s life. Had the intensity and ambition he’d inherited made a personal crisis inevitable for him as well?

Then a chance offer gave him the opportunity to train for the Chicago Marathon with elite coaches. Giving himself over to the sport more fully than ever before, he discovered that aging didn’t necessarily put you on an unbroken trajectory of decline. For seven years after his father died, Thompson transforms his body to perform at its highest capacity, and the profound discipline and awareness he builds along the way changes every aspect of his life. Throughout the narrative, he weaves in stories of remarkable men and women who have used the sport to transcend some of the hardest moments in life.

The Running Ground is a story about fathers, sons, and the most basic and most beautiful of sports.

Zusammenfassung
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A profound meditation on what running can teach us about our limits and our lives by a record-setting distance runner who is now the CEO of The Atlantic.

“This is not just an engaging memoir about running. It’s a meditation on what it takes to marshal and maintain motivation.”—ADAM GRANT, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Potential and Think Again

“Endlessly surprising, revelatory, and heart-rending.”—ANNA WINTOUR

For Nicholas Thompson, running has always been about something more than putting one foot in front of another. He ran his first mile at age five, using it as a way to connect with his father as his family fell apart. As a young man, it was a sport that transformed, and then shook, his sense of self-worth. In his 30s, it was a way of coping with a profound medical scare.

By his early 40s, Thompson had many accomplishments. He was the Editor in Chief of a major magazine; a devoted husband and father; and a passionate runner. But he was haunted by the recent death of his brilliant, complicated father and the crack-up that derailed his father’s life. Had the intensity and ambition he’d inherited made a personal crisis inevitable for him as well?

Then a chance offer gave him the opportunity to train for the Chicago Marathon with elite coaches. Giving himself over to the sport more fully than ever before, he discovered that aging didn’t necessarily put you on an unbroken trajectory of decline. For seven years after his father died, Thompson transforms his body to perform at its highest capacity, and the profound discipline and awareness he builds along the way changes every aspect of his life. Throughout the narrative, he weaves in stories of remarkable men and women who have used the sport to transcend some of the hardest moments in life.

The Running Ground is a story about fathers, sons, and the most basic and most beautiful of sports.

Leseprobe
Chapter 1

Thirteen Seconds

Never, never, never again take on mice when you can take on tigers. The mice have the right to chew you to death. The tigers will fight and you’ll win.

—Email from my father to me, December 1997

On a Sunday in early November 2007, I woke up at 4:30 in the morning and tiptoed out of my bedroom, trying not to wake my wife, Danielle. I navigated to the kitchen, using my phone as a flashlight. There I found the breakfast that I’d laid out the night before: bananas and a salt bagel with peanut butter next to a glass of water. I put on my thin, light racing uniform and then draped myself in baggy sweatpants and a sweatshirt from the Salvation Army. I turned the brass knob of our apartment door and headed out into the cool Brooklyn morning, delighted that the house was still quiet. Danielle was sound asleep and nurturing a tiny, curved body—then roughly the size of a blueberry—whose heart had just started to beat.

I was 32 years old, starting my annual pilgrimage from Brooklyn to Staten Island, where the New York City Marathon begins. From there, it winds through the five boroughs to the finish line in Central Park. On my way to the 4/5 train, I saw other marathoners leaving buildings nearby, like crabs emerging from their burrows in the sand before storming together toward the sea.

Not everyone can run a marathon, but it’s remarkable how many can. There are the graceful leaders moving like antelopes on the veldt, and the elite wheelchair racers whose arms are thick as oaks. But then there are the rest of us, of every shape, size, and age. We go to the starting line together before we gradually slip apart. Marathons may be the only sporting event where anybody can directly test themselves against the very best in the world on the same day, in the same place.

I moved slowly down the stairs to the subway, conserving energy by bringing both feet together before moving to the next step. On the 4 train, and then the Staten Island Ferry, I closed my eyes so I could visualize the race. At Fort Wadsworth, where the runners gathered, I lay on my back, stared at the sky, and tried to imagine each mile ahead—but my mind shifted to my father, who had run this race once, in 1982, and ridden the same ferry and sat somewhere in this same park. His life back then was a tempest of contradictions. He was working in the Reagan Administration as he came to terms with the realization that he was gay. He had begun to achieve the professional recognition he had long sought, even as he made a bonfire out of the structures—marriage, family, and social groups—that had supported his career. He had blown up his marriage with my mother and left the leafy Boston suburbs to cruise the alleyways of Dupont Circle.

His life was manic and confused, and he was entering a period of record-setting promiscuity and little sleep. But he was still a runner, and this habit seemed to create just enough gravitational force for him to hold his life together. He ran every morning, alternating runs of 12 miles and 6 miles. When I visited him at his new home on Q Street, he would head out on a run before I woke up and return, covered in sweat, just as I was making my way down his dusty, half-renovated stairway with its broken banister. On the day of the 1982 New York marathon, he had sat in this park and hit play on Vivaldi’s Orlando furioso on his Walkman. It was, he would later write, appropriate that he was listening to an opera about “a stirring figure driven mad by the world’s demands.”

I rubbed Vaseline between my toes to prevent blisters a…