To most of the world, Nicholas Thompson is known as an editor, an AI enthusiast, or something of a LinkedIn influencer. But the former WIRED editor in chief, who is now CEO of The Atlantic, is often better known to colleagues as the guy who runs to the office.
On Tuesday, Thompson is releasing The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports. As the title suggests, it’s a book about his commitment to running—Thompson runs a ridiculously fast marathon and holds the American 50K record for the 45-49 age group. Ultimately, though, the book examines the complicated relationship between the sport, Thompson, and his father, who first took him on a run when he was just 5 years old. Tech obsessives, of course, will also get their fix: The Running Ground includes plenty of science-backed training guidance and documents Thompson’s experience training with elite Nike coaches.
On this week’s episode of The Big Interview, I talked to Thompson (who was also my first boss; he hired me as an intern at WIRED in 2008) about his book, the interplay between running and addiction, and what he thinks AI can do for runners and for writers.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Nick Thompson, welcome to The Big interview.
NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Thank you, Katie. It is a joy to be here with you at Condé Nast at WIRED. It’s been a while. I loved coming up those elevators. I love seeing you as the editor in chief. It’s a plus.
That’s so nice. I’m thrilled that you’re here. We’re going to start this conversation the way we start all of them, which is with a little warmup, some rapid-fire questions.
Fire away.
In honor of your new book, The Running Ground, I’m gonna make them entirely running themed. With apologies to our listeners … ready?
I mean, if your listeners don’t wanna hear about running …
… now would be the time to go.
But let’s go.
Trail run or track run?
Trail run.
Running with music or silence?
Silence.
Worst running injury you’ve ever had.
Achilles tendon going capooch in an ultra.
Most bogus myth about running. The one you wish people would stop talking to you about.
You only need to run a 20-miler before a marathon.
What do you need to run?
More than that?
22?
Twenty-four, 26, 28, 30. They’re all better than 20. Why do people die at mile 20? Because they only train for [marathons] with 20-mile-runs.
Running with people or running alone?
That’s hard. I generally prefer people, but then you have to schedule it. So running alone.
Backup sport of choice if you could never run again.
Soccer.
That’s cheating.
Walking.
Fine. Power walking.
What sport can you do if you can’t run? Like, I don’t know, skeet shooting, Katie?
Power elliptical’ing.
No. OK, fine.
Strength training. You wanna, like, get swole?
Do I look like a guy who likes strength training?
You could get there.
I love walking. I love hiking, and I love soccer. That’s good.
OK, so be very careful with your legs. What’s your favorite running-related internet website? This is my WIRED angle.
LetsRun.com
OK. Why?
Hilarious, crazy message board.
OK, I’m gonna set the scene for our listeners a little bit if they’ve stuck with us thus far. Nick, in 2008 I believe you made a significant error: You hired me to be your intern. I was 22. I’m gonna bring this back to running. [On my first day] I was waiting for you outside the WIRED offices. I’d come up the elevator. I was waiting for you.
Oh God.
You were like 15 minutes late, and you showed up in your running clothes. You had run to the office. So aside from my interview for the internship, which by the way was a train wreck, a disaster, my first encounter with you was actually with Nick, the Guy Who Runs to the Office.
So you ran WIRED, you were the editor in chief. Now I run WIRED. Somehow. You’re the CEO of The Atlantic, and you’re publishing a book about your running career and much more. I just want be clear with our listeners here, Nick doesn’t hold any power over me anymore.
That being said, I don’t think I held any power over you when you were the intern. You did what you wanted to do, and then you went off and worked on [WIRED blog] Danger Room. You were amazing.
That’s very kind. I am also a runner. I am nowhere near as talented a runner as Nick, to be very clear. But I could not pass up a chance to talk about running with you. I also want to say it’s a fantastic book. It is. Whether you run or not, I think you will find this book very compelling.
Much of the book, ultimately, yes, it’s about running, but it’s really, to me, about family and about relationships and about what we take from our parents and what we give to our children, and it was very moving for me in that context. So, tell me where the idea for the book came from in the first place.
When I was at WIRED, I went through this interesting experiment where I had sort of started to train differently, and I had made this very surprising improvement in my forties where I went from running 2:40 marathons or 2:43s for 15 years and then suddenly running 2:29.
That’s not what’s supposed to happen in your mid-forties. I was running across the Brooklyn Bridge one morning on my way to work, running to WIRED, and I had a realization. It literally hit me like a lightning bolt, and I had to sit down. The realization was that I had gotten sick. I got thyroid cancer when I was 30 years old. Also when I was at WIRED. Right before then I had run a 2:43 marathon—right after I’d run a 2:43 marathon.
Right.
I realized that through my thirties, I had kind of been blocked because, all I thought I could do and all I wanted to do was to be as fast as I was before I got sick. It was an interesting realization about myself, but it was also an interesting realization about the sport.
What slows you down can be buried deep inside, and in such interesting ways that you can’t even see it yourself. So that was a story I wanted to tell. And then the second story I wanted to tell is about my father, who had this remarkable crazy life.
Yes.
It’s just a good narrative and has a lot of lessons, and it’s a very American story of a rise and fall. Firing up the American meritocracy, getting people to be convinced he’s gonna be president and then blowing his whole life up and ending up as a tax fugitive, running a pseudo-brothel in Bali.
We communicated through running. My father died two weeks after I started as the editor in chief of WIRED, and it was in this period that I was thinking a lot about the role running played in my life and my relationship with my father. So then I decided to write the book. I wrote an essay for WIRED, and then five years later … It goes slowly, you know, I have these other responsibilities. It took five years.
Five years.
Five years.
That’s very reassuring.
It’s a short book. It’s not a long book, right? It’s not like Robert Caro. I’m not writing 900 pages of deeply reported stuff. It’s a book about me, and it’s like, what, 225 pages?
I was going to ask you about your cancer diagnosis later on, but because you brought it up, I’ll ask about it now. I knew that you had had thyroid cancer, but I obviously didn’t know the ins and outs of it until I read the book. Running to me is such a life-affirming activity, and to then be forced to confront death very directly at 30 years old …
Yeah.
You just talked a bit about how that changed your relationship with the sport, but I would love for you to talk more about that.
It was very tied into the sport. I was supposed to have the check-in with my general practitioner right before the New York Marathon in 2005, and then I delayed it because my knee hurt. And I was sure that if I saw him, he would say, “Don’t run the marathon.”
And you of course …
Can’t do that. No. So I delayed it and then I saw him a week after, two weeks after the marathon. So it was always tied in very deeply with running. Then one of the things I lost when I went through all the treatments, which would take the next six months or so, was I lost the ability to run.
Right.
I couldn’t run or walk around the block. So I lost that thing that I had loved. But that experience did a lot more that is only becoming clearer in retrospect. To confront that at that age … You just take life a lot more seriously and you think more carefully about the things that matter and the things that don’t matter, and you probably learn to focus more. You appreciate things. You forge deeper friendships with people. You care more about your family.
There’s post-traumatic growth after surviving cancer. You don’t wanna force this obviously, but if you get cancer and you survive it, you tend to have very positive life outcomes. Lots of studies show this, and so I think that kind of happened with me.
It was this interesting period in my life where I had struggled professionally until I was about 30, and then I kind of fortuitously got this job at WIRED. I started having children, started running faster. Like lots of stuff starts to go well after things had gone not so well the previous eight or 10 years.
A lot of people, myself included, conceive of running as a solitary sport. That’s one of the reasons I love it. It is the one part of my day where I don’t interact with anybody else. But you write in the book that you ran your first mile at age 5 with your dad.
Yeah.
And you talk later in the book about running with your sons in Prospect Park in Brooklyn.
Yeah. I love it.
So what is it about running for you that helps create that kind of connection with other people? What is the social piece of that for you?
So, there’s different elements of it. With my dad, it was just a way to connect, right? He was starting to run seriously. It was the late-’70s running boom. He was training for marathons for the first time in his life. It was the first thing he’d done, committed himself physically and athletically. My parents divorced when I was 6 or 7. So running with him before that happened was amazing.
Of course, it deeply imprinted because I don’t have that many memories of my father while he was still married to my mother and we were still living in Boston. Very few because I was quite young. I do remember running. That was extremely important: running with my sons. I love that the sport has meant so much to me and the fact they seem to enjoy doing it.
Do they?
Maybe they’ll write a book about their cursed father when they’re older, but they’re clearly into it. My middle son, Zachary—I’m gonna keep running marathons until we can run one together. That’s my objective. He wants to run the New York City Marathon. He wants to run the Prospect Park marathon coming up.
But to the social element of running, you know, you can have really interesting conversations with people when you’re outside. You’re not looking at each other, but you’re not not looking at each other, right? You’re not in a forced situation. No one’s gonna tap you on the shoulder. You’re not at a party, right? Like, it’s a different kind of context. You have pretty interesting conversations because you’re on a run with someone.
When you’re in high school, you join a team and you try to beat the other teams. When you’re in your twenties, you join a New York recreational club and it’s just a fun part of your identity and a little bit of a community. It’s hard to make friends when you’re in your twenties, thirties, and forties.
It’s a way to break the ice with people. Oh, we’re teammates. Like now we’re friends. So there is a real social element at this point in my life. It’s almost all solo. Just ’cause my life is so tightly scheduled.
You talked a little bit about running in high school. You ran in high school, you realized you were good at it, and you say in the book that it made you better at everything else. Fast-forwarding to now, how has that concept served you?
I think a lot of people think that running is a time suck. It’s a barrier to getting more done. I would argue the opposite, but I’m curious about how you think about that or how you argue that point.
When I was in high school, it made me better at everything because it was the first thing I was good at. When you’re in high school, you’re not good at anything. I went to this very competitive high school, and when you’re not good at anything, you’re not that cool and nobody wants to talk to you.
Then you run and you’re setting records and you’re cool. So that was important. That sort of made me have self-confidence. When you have self-confidence, you are able to do multiple things better. We become the people we are through the things we do. We form habits and we learn things through them, and there are things that you learn by running every day that are valuable skills, right? Just going out requires a certain amount of discipline. It requires a certain amount of stoicism.
I believe that discipline is cumulative. That’s a contested notion in social psychology. But I think if you do something hard in the morning, it’s easier to do something hard in the afternoon.
Agree.
It teaches you a little bit about perseverance. It teaches you a little bit about focus, right?
You learn in workouts that if you give up on yourself, you’re never gonna get better. So you learn habits of mind and habits of body that are useful to the rest of your life.
I’m pretty good at staying focused in a long Zoom call. Now, is that because I’ve done intense marathons? Am I good at intense marathons ’cause I’ve done a lot of intense Zoom calls? Who knows? So there are habits that, if you’re training intensely, you’re paying attention to your sleep. You’re probably not drinking much, right? All these things that kind of help you be disciplined, focused, and be productive in your life. Now, there’s another side, which is that you spent all this time, right?
Right.
Like what if I’d spent all this time, I don’t know, learning to code Python? What if that was my habit? Would I have been a better editor of WIRED? What if I spent it all socializing? Would I have found another story through a source? Like what if I had spent a lot of time reading?
Who knows, right? There’s a lot of things that you give up on, and so there’s trade-offs, and then it can put strains on your relationships. You run at the level of intensity I do, you better have a spouse who’s pretty forgiving on that kind of stuff. If you don’t, it’s gonna be a real burden. Running’s kind of a selfish endeavor. You know, it’s about you, right?
Yeah.
If I think of anything that running has displaced in my life, I don’t think it’s displaced work, honestly. I don’t think it’s displaced family. It has displaced music. I used to play guitar all the time, and so I’ve essentially traded my intense guitar playing for my intense running. Not entirely, but mostly.
Music is like a generous thing. Like you do it and other people hear it and they’re moved by it and think it’s beautiful. Running, you do it well and you push everybody back a place, right?
And you’re excited for yourself.
And then you can be so boring. What was the joke? How do you get a marathoner to tell you their time at a cocktail party? Don’t worry. They’ll let you know themselves.
Or they won’t be there because they already went to bed. I want to ask you a little bit about your dad, because so much of the book goes back to that relationship.
You both went to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. That’s a very intense high school. You went to Stanford, so did your dad. You figured out you were good at running, so was he. When did running become more of a thing for you, for Nick?
I mean, that was probably in high school because my dad was a marathoner and he was a good recreational marathoner, but I was like a teenage track star. That was a different thing. I remember when I first got into running and I ran two miles in like 10 minutes and 48 seconds. This big race and it’s this cool thing, and it’s a great time for my age, for a sophomore who’s just come to the sport.
I remember asking my dad, “How fast do you think you could run 2 miles?” He’d be like, “I don’t know, like 10 minutes.” He’s like, “I don’t know, 14 minutes.” I still remember we were in Medford, Massachusetts. And I was like, “Oh, I have a kind of a different thing than what you had.”
In my twenties when I was running marathons, I was slower than he had run his marathons, but we kind of come at the sport in different ways. So my identity was always a little outside of him. Now my general identity is deeply tied in with his. We are very similar people who operate in lots of similar ways, besides the alcoholism and sex addiction and tax fugitive status and all that kind of stuff.
There’s a lot that we have in common, not just the schools we went to, and weirdly, we both spent a lot of time in West Africa right after college. We both have similar personalities and similar things that hold us back professionally and things that help us go forward professionally.
What do you think holds you back professionally?
What held him back professionally was inability to really focus on a single thing, right? That was my fundamental problem in my twenties.
So my dad, the first real critiques of him come from the deans at Oxford who are like, “This guy can’t focus.” Weirdly, they said he should be a journalist, not an academic.
Inexhaustible energy, but he’s incapable of really doing the work he needs to do and incapable of really staying still and staying on task.
And you’re the same?
So because they said that about him, I tell the story about when I was hired at The New Yorker, where at first I’m rejected by The New Yorker as an editor, and then I go in and see [editor] David Remnick, and it’s three months later and I knew how close I’d come to getting hired, and I was like, “David, you know I’m gonna go work at a competitor unless you hire me now.”
He’s like, “Well here’s the thing, Nick: I don’t think you can stay on task. That’s why we didn’t hire you the first time. You’re too scattered. You wanna have this TV career. You’re doing weird stuff in Hollywood. You have this weird company called the Atavist. I have a job, but the job involves sitting in your chair and getting stories and then making the stories better, and then standing up from your chair and giving them to the writer and then sitting back at your chair.” And he’s like, “Can you do that?”
And that was the same critique of my dad.
One of the prevailing themes that stood out to me in the book was addiction.
Yeah.
Anecdotally, I’ve observed that a lot of the people I know and love who run also have struggled or do struggle with some kind of addiction. There seems to be a connection between running and addictive personality types, if you will. I haven’t looked into it in depth; do you think about that?
I don’t think I understand that dynamic as well as I’d like to. Lemme just tell a couple stories.
Tell me some stories.
I have a running partner and one of the guys who I run most intensely with, this guy named Yung Cohen, and we do lots of ultra races together. He had a chemical dependency in his twenties and thirties. The last race we ran was a hundred kilometers in the woods in a race that took like 13 hours. Like you’re going up steep mountains. He told me once that he runs because he wants to reach the level of pain that he had when he was an addict so that he remembers what it is and never feels it again.
That’s a way you can use running to cope with an addiction. Another story is this guy Tony Ruiz. I have a whole chapter on him in the book; he’s an elite runner who, when his career hits a setback and he can’t go to the Olympics with the Puerto Rican team because of the United States boycott of the Moscow games, he falls into drug addiction. Then he gets clean and running is a way for him to hold his life together. He runs with this sort of dedication and focus, and he becomes my coach.
I didn’t know his story. I just, he was my coach. He’s Tony, right? I didn’t understand the meaning of it all—I mean, I knew a little bit about it, which is why I started talking to him—until we started spending many hours together for the writing of this book. So I think there’s a very complicated interplay.
And then there’s also this fact about running where it’s like, if you are a runner, you feel like you’re invincible. So you drink too much, right? And the next day you think “I’ll just go for a run.”
Run it off.
Of course, it can work in the other direction where you’re like, Oh my God. Right now I feel fragile as a runner. Have a race coming up. I’m not gonna drink anything until the New York Marathon.
So there’s a very complicated interplay, but I think you’re right. If you look at the number of great ultra runners, like Rich Roll would be the canonical example, people who’ve gotten clean, restarted, found salvation through endurance sports. Somehow that either taps into the same personality or displaces the thing that was being dealt with with alcohol.
I think you see that a lot with my father. You know, he balanced some of his heaviest drinking with his heaviest running, which is not what you would imagine.
Later in life, I was obsessed with trying to get him to stop drinking. I always thought if I could get him to run more, he would drink less. One day I had the realization that they’re like the opposite thing, like drinking makes you feel good and then you regret it. Running makes you feel bad and then you’re glad you did it.
I know exactly what you mean. There’s a line in the book … I’m not going to give away the entire book, I promise.
But it’s not like there’s a super-surprise end. There’s not a spoiler, right? Don’t I sit down and do a podcast with Katie Drummond and that’s the last episode?
Don’t tell people that. Maybe they’ll think there’s a crazy …
Oh yeah, there’s a crazy plot twist.
But there’s a line in the book where you’re writing about your dad and you say, “I did not inherit his alcoholism, at least not yet.”
Yeah.
You could have ended that sentence earlier. You didn’t, there’s a comma and then you say, “at least not yet.” It stood out to me in the context of running and addiction, and I’m curious about whether you think about that on a personal level.
I did think a lot about that sentence. I mean, you spend five years on a book and it’s a short book. You think about every sentence, you know? God help me. I’m terrified of falling into all the same patterns, right? My grandfather’s an alcoholic. My great-grandfather’s an alcoholic, dies of a heart attack. My father’s an alcoholic, dies of a heart attack. Like, what do you think I worry about? Every time I have a drink, I have in the back of my mind that I don’t want to become an alcoholic.
It would’ve been hubristic for me to say I did not inherit his alcoholism because I don’t know, like as of today, I’m not an alcoholic. I barely had any alcohol to drink in the last, I don’t know, however long.
Nick has been hydrating.
I hydrate. But who knows, right? You can fall into it.
Now I wanna talk about a little performance science.
OK, great.
There’s a chapter in the book where you talk about the training you did through a Nike program, and you actually wrote a story about this for WIRED. I remember reading it when it came out. And they essentially paired, quote-unquote “regular runners” with elite coaches.
They’re coming for you next, Katie.
Well, they can. That would actually be amazing. But your training markedly improved. You became a significantly better runner through that process.
What were the biggest breakthroughs for you? What did you learn from a scientific, performance point of view from that coaching?
Tons. It’s a very deep process. About a year after I started as editor of WIRED, I started working with these three people, Steve Finley, who’s like my day-to-day coach, Brett Kirby, who’s like the mad scientist genius in the Nike Labs, and Joe Holder, who’s this sort of a great whole-body conditioner. I talk to them about my goals. I say I’d love to run another 2:43 marathon.
At that point I wanted to run two hours plus my age in minutes, which is pretty dorky, but I was 43. And they listen and then they’re like, “OK, great. How much do you train? What do you do?” And then they have a conference call and they’re like, “This guy could go faster than 2:43. What is wrong with him?” But they can’t just say that to me. They can’t just say, “You can go faster.” They have to sort of subtly trick me to believe I can go faster.
Right.
And so there are all kinds of very specific things that I do, right? I start to run workouts where you’re running as hard as you can for 5 kilometers, but you’re doing it for like a mile and then you’re resting for two minutes. Then you’re doing it for another mile. I’m doing these things you call lactate threshold runs where you’re going out and you’re running 2 miles.
I start doing more of that. I’m spending more time running fast. They had me running a little bit more mileage; they’re starting to improve my diet. They point out that if you drink beet juice it increases the flow of nitric oxygen and nitric oxide in your body and that increases your oxygen uptake.
I start to take L-citrulline supplements. And here’s the most important thing: Weirdly, I started to wear a heart rate monitor on my arm. I had worn a heart rate monitor on my wrist, like a watch. But it doesn’t work, right? Because there’s bone and your wrist moves, right? So if it’s measuring through this light and it’s bouncing around, it’s always wrong. Getting bad data is not helpful. We put it on the fattier, more stable tissue on your arm, you know, right below the elbow or up on your bicep, suddenly it works, right? So you actually accurately know what your heart rate is while you run. That’s a super interesting indicator. I know what my maximum heart rate is. It’s about 160. And I know that when I’m running really hard, it’s like 150.
Nick, what is your resting heart rate?
It’s like 42. It’s not that low. It’s low, but it’s not crazy low. I’m older than you. That’s why my maximum heart rate is low.
Well, I think my resting heart rate is like 43.
So there we are, right? Nike, Katie Drummond.
Nike, I’m available.
When you start to realize that when you’re gonna work out your heart rate’s like 135. Oh, I can push harder, right? Or you can start to pace yourself better in a marathon. As long as you are getting true data and you’re analyzing it in a smart and responsible way, it is helpful.
Now when I run a marathon, even a workout, I’m tracking my time, I’m tracking how I feel, and I’m tracking my heart rate. I also learned a philosophy of running from Brett Kirby, which was important, which is: You have all these systems that can fail, like your quads can fail, right? You can overheat, your toenails can get cut off. Your digestive system. All these things can go wrong when you run. The challenge is to stress all those systems before a marathon or before an ultra more than they’ll be stressed on race day, but you can’t stress them all at the same time.
So you stress your quads by doing a hard run down a mountain. You stress your hydration by running 18 miles while dehydrated. You stress your digestive system by eating too much and then going and running. So I kind of developed this philosophy of training. Then the most important thing they did is they tricked me, in that they recognized I was scared of running a marathon at a pace faster than six minutes per mile. And in order to get me to be comfortable going faster than six minutes per mile, they should get me out on the track running faster than five minutes per mile.
Like if I get used to looking at my watch and it’s like 4:40 pace, maybe when I’m running down Prospect Park and running an eight-minute, 8-mile workout at 5:40 pace, then it won’t feel so scary. This is one of the things that I believe most deeply, and I didn’t realize this until my forties: Pain is not primarily physiological. It’s mental, right? Your body gets scared of losing homeostasis and it starts to send pain signals. It’s partly why pain signals are so diffuse. Like what was slowing you down this morning? I don’t know. My legs felt heavy. Like what does that mean?
Right.
It’s not like your muscles are failing because your legs are heavy. Lactic acid is building up. Lactic acid is not making your legs feel heavy because your brain is worried that you can’t keep this pace, it’s worried about homeostasis or your heart rate or your heart failing, and so it slows you down.
That’s why, I think, you can run a marathon and you just feel this weird pain, like, oh, your shoulder hurts. Like, why would my shoulder hurt? Oh my God, my quad hurts. My knees are killing me. Oh wait, there’s the finish line. And then you sprint and you’re like, I feel great. Then you have actual muscle soreness and real things happen, but what’s going on during the race is all mental. So once you know that, then you develop different strategies for coping with it.
This is one of the places in the book where I started to get really stressed out.
[Laughs]
No, no, no, it’s fine. But you wrote about running down mountains to tear your quads up, running 20 miles without drinking water or eating breakfast. Running when it’s hot, when it’s cold, when it’s humid, when it’s dark. When you’re hungry, when you’re full.
Conventional wisdom would be to do everything possible to make your run reasonably comfortable, right? So you’re going out for 20 miles, you’re eating an hour and a half before that, you’re bringing water. You’re doing things to make that experience not one of extraordinary suffering. Running is already suffering in many senses, right? And you are essentially describing a training process that involves suffering more.
Suffering differently.
Sure. Suffering differently. But it sounds like what you’re saying is that that was the key for you to unlock a lot of progress.
Yes, absolutely.
That is unfortunate to hear.
I was doing that before the Nike people. I just didn’t know why it was effective. I just did it because I was busy. I would run at like midnight when your digestive system’s a mess, because it was the only time to run in the day.
Or I would run at four in the morning because it was the only time to work out before the kids woke up. I would run after eating way too much because I was at a work dinner. So I had actually weirdly inculcated this training philosophy.
Of all the research you’ve read and the work that you’ve put in, everything you’ve used in your own training, what stands out to you the most for a conventional runner?
You just have to run a little bit more, and you have to learn how to suffer a little bit. That will make you run faster.
But what you really need to do is the opposite. I think the best advice I can give to someone who’s just getting into the sport is to experiment with different kinds of presence. Like think about next time you go for a run. Katie, I dunno if you do this, try to shut down your field of vision and just listen.
Then try to shut down your auditory sensation and just watch. Or just smell, or just feel your feet on the ground. Forget about all of that and just think about your heels. Start turning running into this meditative process. Suddenly, it starts to do things and it starts to open up your mind.
It starts to lead to a little bit more body awareness. Think about your arm character and think about the aerodynamics of your hands while you run. You torture yourself if you do that too much. But it’s a way of just getting into your body in a way that can create these sort of beautiful psychological experiences. That’s partly why I don’t listen to music. If I’m running to work, who cares? I’m running across Canal Street. I’ll listen to podcasts. And catch up on the news, you know? But if I am actually running in the woods, I’m trying to cultivate a kind of awareness, both of myself and of my surroundings.
It’s a form of meditation, and I think when people can get to that, then they start to fall in love with the sport and then that’s what propels them forward.
I’m curious what you think are the most interesting or potentially consequential areas of research you want to see more from. What might we know about running and health, maybe the limits of our own bodies in five years or 10 years, that we don’t know now?
The science of what shoes do for you. The science of form. Most running coaches don’t mess with your form, right? The body learns the most natural way to run.
Is that right?
Like, I don’t think so. I certainly learned in my life that it was through paying attention to form that I was able to cure a bunch of injuries, right? Thinking about how I sit, how I stand, through this process called the Alexander technique. So the science of form I think is totally an open question.
There’s a lot of nutritional science that is interesting. Basically nutritional intake. The conventional wisdom was you take like a hundred calories of GU every 45 minutes, right? That’s what I did most of my marathons on. Now I kind of take in 200 calories of carbohydrates every hour, 250. But there are people like David Roach who are out there taking like 500, and that’s kind of interesting. Then there’s people taking sodium bicarbonate, and they figured out ways that you can do it without having digestive explosions during a race, which is great. Because before if you took it, you’d have a problem.
It’s fun to think about. I want ask you a little bit about the process of writing the book. We know that it took five years. We’ve established that. But in particular, this being WIRED and you being someone who has a lot of expertise in AI, I am curious how you use that technology in the process. I assume certainly not the writing itself. It’s very clearly Nick’s words, but how did that make it maybe five years instead of nine years?
Or five years instead of four years, you know, because the tools are just coming out and sometimes you waste time on them.
Sure.
I used it in lots of ways. I use it partly in my training, and I will often upload what I’ve eaten and ask, “What should I eat?” This is how I train and you know, I have an AI coach. I have a custom GPT.
You do? Did you make that?
Yeah. I have a custom GPT. I’ve uploaded all my workouts. I’ve uploaded all my previous races. I tried to upload all my Strava logs. I’ve given it as much information as I can, and I will often ask it questions, like “Should I delay the 5-mile workout to Thursday?” I don’t have a coach I work with, so I have an AI coach. I use it all the time. The most genuinely useful thing it was good for was analyzing years of notes.
There are five characters in the book, and there are five discreet chapters where I take readers into the lives of runners who I crossed paths with. These are people I interviewed over the course of five years. You interview someone over the course of five years in this kind of episodic way and you forget what you talked about. So with each of those sections, I took what I had written and then I uploaded all of the transcripts of the conversations and I asked like, “Is what I’ve written totally true to what they said? Are there any quotes that I haven’t used that would be super useful? Is there anything I’ve said that’s factually inaccurate? Is there anything thematically that they seem to focus on or care about that I haven’t emphasized?” It was the kind of task that I could have done with Tony in like 15 hours, or I could have hired a research assistant and it would have taken them 20 hours, or you can have Claude do it in one minute.
That was super helpful. I never used it to write a sentence, because I think it’s unethical. It’s a memoir, and there are legal issues, because whose copyright is it then? Also AI writing sucks. One of the things I tried really hard to do—the staff writers at WIRED who are listening, you’ll remember this—is cut everything extraneous.
Yes.
The reader does not have a lot of time. This book is about 80,000 words long. I have a file of 60,000 words that I cut. So I wrote like 140,000, probably more. I probably wrote 200,000 words for this book. But each time I would edit it, I would go through and I would be like, “Does this sentence need to be here?”
I would use AI sometimes for that. It’s actually pretty good at that. Then there’s this other thing. Because I’ve been writing this book over five years in like 30 minute intervals …
Right.
There’s very few times where there’s like four hours of focus time, because that never exists in my life. So sometimes you’ll go for a run and you’ll have an interesting thought, right? I had a file and it was like: Interesting Thoughts to Add to Book. But you don’t wanna just add them. Like, where does this fit thematically? So some time late in the process I still had 20 interesting thoughts that I hadn’t put in. So I’d be like, “Where should I put this?” And it would be like, “Well, we put it here, you could put it there.” Right? It has instantaneous access to the whole thing. That was really, really useful.
I want to ask you a question that I’ve wanted to ask you for many years, but I finally have my chance. I want to know, Nick, how you manage your time. You have three kids. You’re married, you’re the CEO of the Atlantic. You run competitively. You do play the guitar, although apparently less now than you did. You write books, you give keynote speeches, you publish a new video on LinkedIn every day.
What does a day in the life of Nick look like? How do you structure your time? How do you get all of this done at a high level?
Well, I probably fall short on some of the stuff. The running, I fit in. I try very hard to be as efficient as possible with the running. I run to the office. I run home from the office. I often listen to podcasts.
You know, this morning I had to do a workout, so I got up at 6 and did the workout before the kids woke up. Because I like having breakfast with the kids. This isn’t a system that works for everybody, but if I were to show you my to-do list, it’s a pretty focused set where it’s a Trello board and it’s basically things I’m gonna do right now, things I’m gonna do today, other things I have to do pretty soon. So if I’m prioritizing: that’s really important, right; and then these are the people I’m gonna call if there’s any free time; and then it’s in these subcategories. But the important part is every day going through, What do I actually care about doing today?
Got it.
There’s a certain efficiency in that. I’m also very good at getting two things out of one thing. So I do “The Most Interesting Thing in Tech,” this daily video on LinkedIn. I started doing it when I was the editor of WIRED. I didn’t do it because I thought it was gonna be a cool thing. I did it ’cause I wanted to learn. It was fun. It was a way of forcing a mechanism of learning. It also has the effect of making me a little better at public speaking and synthesizing information for TV. We’ve now realized it’s really good for Atlantic marketing.
It’s trying to figure out all these ways where you can be accomplishing two goals at the same time. The other secret is that if you ask my wife, there’s a bunch of stuff that slips through the cracks too.
OK. Well, next week Nick’s wife will be joining me. That’s the sequel.
We’re gonna wrap up by playing one more game that we came up with. It’s called Control, Alt, Delete. It’s like Fuck, Marry, Kill for nerds. It’s going to be running-themed this week. So I want to know what piece of running tech you would love to control, what piece you would alter or change, and what you would delete. What would you vanquish from the earth?
What would I control? Um, the weather.
Ooh, very good.
It matters so much for race training. You want varied weather.
Some of us do. Others not so much.
For the New York Marathon, I would like it to be 40 degrees, to have very little wind, overcast, and to the extent there is wind, I would like it to blow north. Until noon, and then I would like it to blow South. It just makes a huge difference.
That’s a very ambitious answer. What about alter?
You mean make different, better?
What would you wanna change?
I would like New York City to have easier access to mountain running. I would like to be able to leave my house on foot and get into the woods. I want some canyons in New City.
So you would like to drastically alter the landscape and infrastructure of New York City to facilitate trail running.
Correct.
These are such ambitious answers. What would you delete?
Most running influencers. Not most, there’s some who are amazing. Then there’s a whole bunch of people who are trying to break through the algorithm. It’s like, “You could run a three-hour marathon if you could do 200 burpees.” And you’re just like, “No, you can’t run a three-hour marathon if you can do 200 burpees.”
The headline now is gonna be “Nick Thompson Is at War with Running Influencers.”
Like awesome runners are awesome—and fun to watch. But delete the pseudoscience. That’s what I wanna get rid of.
Weather, geography, pseudoscience. Perfect. Thank you, Nick Thompson. This was awesome.
Katie Drummond, I’m so glad I hired you as an intern in 2008, and I’m so glad you didn’t quit when I showed up in my running shorts, because that would’ve been terrible for WIRED in the long run.
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