Nick Thompson - CEO of The Atlantic- Author-- "The Running Ground"

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A few months ago, in the middle of summer, I got a chance to sit down with Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, to talk about his brand new book, "The Running Ground." We got to talk about the book—what inspired it, how he approached it, and how he managed to create a compelling narrative. So this is a podcast episode about running, but it's also about writing and about the challenges of telling a good story.

Nick's journalism career started at the Washington Monthly when he was around 24 or 25, working as a political journalist. From there, he moved to Wired magazine as an editor, then to the New Yorker, where he eventually ran the website, learning the business side of journalism. This led to his role as editor-in-chief of Wired before becoming CEO of The Atlantic, which was founded in 1857.

But Nick is also a serious runner. In his mid-40s, Nike reached out to him as part of a program pairing non-elite runners with elite coaches. Through this process, he discovered he had talent he hadn't tapped into—his coaches realized that part of his problem was a fear of running fast, a mental block about what he could achieve. They had to "trick" him into going faster. The result was dramatic: he dropped his marathon time from 2:43 to 2:29, and eventually set an American record in the 50K at age 45, running 3:04.

The book was originally going to be structured like a marathon and, of course, it was going to have 26 chapters, but then the chronology made no sense. The advice he got from a writer friend is that he needed to take the reader "deep inside the mind of the runner," and importantly, another bit of advice: "you have to make us care" and "you have to make us care about you." Where he ended up is an original and intriguing concept where he manages to weave his life, his father's life, and five other running characters together into a story. Once he had something, there was a process of editing out the unimportant stuff to focus on what mattered.

The spark for the book was his father's death—on a plane back from his funeral, he wrote a 5,000-word letter to his three kids telling the story of their grandfather. This became the starting point, but he ended up telling his dad's story, his story, and also the stories of the first woman to run the Boston Marathon, his coach who had a story of addiction and recovery, his running partner who was homeless at one point in pursuit of her dream, a runner who developed Parkinson's, and another runner who has won a 3,100-mile race nine years in a row.

As the Washington Monthly wrote in its review: "The Running Ground crackles with big ideas about intergenerational inheritance, the power of love and forgiveness, the inevitability of aging, the mind-body connection, and the value of hard work. The memoir's intertwined stories—Thompson's relationship with his father alongside Thompson's own journey as a marathon runner hitting his stride midlife—are compelling narratives."