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…