Read: 2025-11-06
Recommend: 10/10
This memoir was both inspiring and informative for my training. I’ve ordered beet juice and will incorporate airplane exercises and z-presses into my strength routine. To improve speed, I’m adding two weekly sessions targeting VO2 max and threshold pace.
Here are some keywords that would help me to search for a few technical details in the future
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
I don’t listen to music while I run. Every workout is a physical challenge—I’m trying to strengthen the muscles in my legs and my heart—but it’s also a mental challenge. I’m trying to teach my body how to move quickly and with good coordination through space. Running is a process of learning about your body and developing habits deep inside it. Music can confuse the signals. I want to deepen my understanding of the relationship between my stride, my pace, my breath. I don’t want a bassline, or the adrenaline that can flow with it, to get in the way.
For the next decade, running was my unrequited crush. I trained like a dilettante and searched for physiological shortcuts that don’t exist. I humiliated myself in races. Then, at 29, and in a rut professionally, I started to train seriously again. I found a coach, a team, and my old talent. I started finishing marathons in just a touch slower than 2:40. I wasn’t elite, but I was now good enough to win the occasional gift certificate from Dick’s Sporting Goods at local road races. I was also old enough to start declining but inexperienced enough to keep improving. For the next decade, these two forces—experience propelling me forward and age pushing me backward—stayed in balance. I was a man walking slowly forward on a moving sidewalk going slowly backward. I ran marathon after marathon in remarkably similar times.
I began to see deep connections between my new methods of training and the way I lived and worked. I began to understand the connections between the mental process one uses to run faster and the mental process one uses to get through anything hard. I learned that pain has physical causes but that it’s mostly a mental process: we slow in races less because we reach our physical limits than because our minds get scared. I realized that my father was wrong: your life doesn’t have to fracture at 40. You can use the lessons you learn in the sport—the discipline, self-awareness, and understanding of life’s rhythms—to hold off the kinds of demons that tormented him. I held on tight to running because I came to believe it would both bring me closer to my father and help me avoid becoming him.
This book is partly a story about the mind of one runner. But it’s also a book in which I’ll tell the stories of five different runners I’ve met along the way: Bobbi Gibb, Tony Ruiz, Julia Lucas, Michael Westphal, and Suprabha Beckjord. They’ve all struggled with the sport, and they’ve all used the sport to process the other ways that life makes us struggle. They show how running can help us both escape and find our way home.
Running is the simplest of sports. But if we look closely, it can teach us about the hardest things in life.
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.
My father complained about my mother endlessly, but my mother almost never mentioned him. Fifteen years after my father left, she married a litigator from Ropes & Gray. My sisters and I adored him, and my mother found a calm she’d never had with my father. She built a lighthouse for us in the stormy seas that my father stirred up. The qualities of “patience” and “endurance” are so similar that they are the same word in Greek, hypomonē. As the apostle Paul wrote, “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” I think my mother could have been an excellent marathoner.
As in all things in my life, my father wanted me to excel and to win. My mother wanted me to be true to myself, content, and kind to others.
I learned something from that track at Moses Brown, something I’ve come back to countless times in my life. If I had understood how fast I was running, I wouldn’t have been able to run that fast. Because I didn’t know the track, because I didn’t know how long the laps were, I didn’t get scared and shut down my body. I just kept going. To do it, I had to first forget that I couldn’t do it.
For some people, an obsession with running closes other doors in the mind, but it just seemed to make my internal engine run hotter: I wanted to study harder than anyone else on campus, and I wanted to run faster than anyone else in New England. I would routinely stay up most of the night working, and I’d start doing homework the minute my alarm chimed on Sunday mornings. I set up a NordicTrack cross-country skiing simulator in my dorm room and spent hours cross-training while listening to instructional cassettes about guitar playing. I look back and see a kid who was driving himself too hard. But teenage years can be treacherous if you don’t have a purpose, and I had found mine. I’m proud to know that kid was me.
When runners enter the sport, it doesn’t take long for them to find their race. Every person has some ratio of fast-twitch muscle fibers that help in sprints and slow-twitch muscle fibers that help at distance.
As we went around the turn into the homestretch, with 500 meters to go, I was close. My friend Trevor Bayliss yelled the inspirational code words that we had agreed upon before the race: one was “Kinsman!” and the other was the name of my ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend.
Like him, I had started as a lonely outsider at this school. Like him, I had learned how to work hard and to catch up. Unlike him, I had learned to be at ease with my peers. I had become, in many ways, the student that my father had wanted to be, and he was thrilled.
She was running to be free and to be spiritually connected to the earth. She was also running away from a society designed by and for men. “Women were so restricted,” she told me. “You couldn’t have a credit card, you couldn’t be a doctor, couldn’t be a lawyer. If you were a woman you had to be in this little box. You had to get married. It was like Pride and Prejudice. I grew up fuming about this. It was thought improper for a grown woman to run in public. And there I am running with horses.”
I spent a lot of time talking with Gibb over the course of several years, trying to understand the source of her courage that day in 1966. She wanted to prove that women could do something most people thought they couldn’t. She wanted to accomplish something for herself: “That was the first goal that I had decided I was going to do. It was something that I was meant to do,” she told me. But, even more, she did it out of love for the sport, for the ground, and for the open air: “When you’re running, you don’t have to think about what your boss wants you to do that day. You’re free. You feel the energy of the universe blowing through you.”
The only advantage for a child in having an alcoholic parent is that you acquire, prematurely, quite a bit of valuable data. —GORE VIDAL
It was around this time that my father started to jog. Drinking and running are mirror opposites. One makes you feel great while you do it and dismal afterward; the other does the reverse. Completing a run can give you an excuse to take a drink or a reason to abstain. To my father, at least at this point, the goal was to try to find something that could bring discipline into the alcohol-pickled mayhem of his days. Running also masked athletic weakness, as he would later tell me, because running was the rare sport where you mostly competed against yourself. You could learn without having to lose.
It was in this period of self-destruction and self-realization that running became part of my father’s identity. He knew he needed a new life. He started eating better and training more.
My father once told me that one has the ability to resist the first affair in a relationship, but once the dam is broken, the waters flood out. The difference from zero to one affair is large; the difference between one and a hundred, he explained, is small.
This was the era in which Mark Wetmore, the legendary coach of the University of Colorado Buffaloes, said, “Go look at Track & Field News. See what those people look like. You should look like a skeleton with a condom pulled over your skull.”
Coach Lananna had studied elite Kenyan distance runners and wanted his runners to do some of the things they did—and some things they didn’t. He had us run strides barefoot after workouts to teach the tendons and muscles in our feet to connect to the ground. He believed that many injuries came from inefficient form and that inefficient form sometimes came from bulky shoes. He had us lift weights in the mornings. He had the runners get massages—a rare practice then and a common one now. It was very clear that he was something of a sorcerer. Our team got remarkably better every week.
I also wrote about my father’s sexuality in my own column for The Stanford Daily. After it was published, the conservative paper on campus, The Stanford Review, published a short note: “Last week Nick Thompson wrote an impassioned plea for openness toward homosexuality in society. We can think of one more argument in support. If society had been more open, perhaps his father wouldn’t have gotten married and then we wouldn’t have to deal with Nick.” I sent the clip to my father, who framed it and hung it in his living room.
But Stanford had its challenges as well. “There was so much pressure for you guys to do well in the classroom,” he said. Students who came “to get this great elite academic experience” weren’t going to succeed on the cross-country team. The runners who succeeded were smart kids who were content to get Bs. Athletics and academics were at odds. “As much as we liked to say they were compatible, they were not compatible,” he said. It’s the thing that everyone knows at Stanford but that no one is supposed to say. Lananna went on to coach at the University of Oregon. There, he added, “kids merely expected to run well and the other stuff was not going to get in the way.”
But back then, at age 21, it was almost all about self-confidence. I didn’t understand then that you could run hard just to teach yourself new things about yourself, your goals, and what it means to be a human inside a flawed physical body. I might have kept at the sport if I had realized that you can run just to understand yourself; you don’t always have to run to win.
Even as my life began to come together, I was chased by the ambitions my father had set for me. He had told me from about age 10 that I was destined to win the Rhodes Scholarship, just like he had. In my junior year, I had won a Truman Scholarship, which seemed like a precursor to the big prize. It was not to be. After I lost, one of the judges on the interview committee wrote to me: “Your intelligence and energy came across well, but it felt as though you were very anxious to appear to have answers to every issue; it didn’t feel like a conversation that moved naturally forward, a dialogue driven by questions. For myself, I will say that trite though it may sound, you don’t seem to have found any inner peace with yourself.”
Only the disciplined ones in life are free. If you are undisciplined, you are a slave to your moods and your passions. —ELIUD KIPCHOGE, TWO-TIME OLYMPIC MARATHON GOLD MEDALIST FOR KENYA
Now, to warm up for a marathon, I do almost nothing. I often sit near the start reading a magazine or newspaper that I can throw away. I try to lower my heart rate and relax my mind. I drink water and eat bananas and, usually, a bagel with peanut butter. Eventually, I get up, walk, and maybe jog for a minute. Then I amble over to the start.
When you train seriously as a runner, you realize two wonderful things: you can’t get faster by magic, and you do get faster with effort.
When we have momentum, our habits seem to continually push us in the right direction. When we don’t, it’s often because our habits are pushing us the other way. It’s a depressing thought because it means that each thing that goes wrong makes everything else, forever into the future, more likely to go wrong. Until we realize that the opposite is also true. Each time we do something right, we create a tiny imperceptible tailwind for the future. I think of this often when I head out for a run. To have run during a day is to at least have done that. As my father descended into mania, the days when he ran were the days he kept everything else in control. If he had run more, could he have done more? When I was a child, there were days when I woke up and wished he hadn’t already put on his sneakers and left the house. Now, looking back, I wish he had kept doing it for longer.
He was genuinely proud that I’d beaten his fastest finish, and he framed a photograph of me crossing the line with the time displayed. One of his great virtues was that he never competed with me or resented any success I had. He had seen the agony that his father’s resentment caused. My father made many mistakes in his life, but this would not be one of them.
I was never quite sure why so much changed for the better in these years, until one day, at an event in Montana, I was sitting in a bus with Arthur Brooks, an expert on happiness and an Atlantic contributor. I asked him to tell me the number-one predictor of happiness and satisfaction. “There’s one thing you can do,” he said. “What’s that?” “Get cancer and survive it,” he responded, unaware that I had ever been sick. He pointed me to the research. Multiple studies have shown that survivors of cancer often experience what is known as post-traumatic growth. Standing on the edge of mortality gives them clarity about what matters. They now appreciate life more; they feel increasingly self-assured; they’ve confronted the fact that they don’t have much time left, so they value it more.
Once at my desk, I’d work as intently as I could, knowing that I’d almost certainly leave at 6 p.m. to go home and play with the boys. When I look back, I also see how I was learning to pace myself, both as a runner and as a journalist. I put aside all the stress I had carried in my 20s as I’d struggled to meet my father’s professional expectations and my own. I was learning to just work hard and steadily and to trust that something good would happen next. And I was learning that everything came together better if I could find time to run and to think.
It was in these years that I learned the most vital running lesson of my life. The weather is always good enough to run in, and there’s always a spot to go. I’ll run in 100-degree heat with ice tucked into my hat and when it’s 15 below with Vaseline rubbed on my nose. I’ll run in hail and in a dust storm. I’ll run circles around a driveway or a parking lot if that’s the only place to go. I’ve disobeyed a thousand no-trespassing signs and been chased by a dozen dogs, at least one cow, and a lemur. A cop in New Hampshire once called my running to a halt thinking I was a prison escapee. I’ve run through Times Square at midnight. I once ran around Las Vegas in shorts and a ski jacket because I forgot to bring a T-shirt on a trip. I’ve run to black-tie events with my tux in my backpack and changed in the men’s room. I’ve jogged to airports and headed right to the security line.
Running with your body completely in sync isn’t easy. One of my feet is slightly larger than the other. The muscles on my left leg are larger (maybe from balancing on it while kicking soccer balls), but the muscles on my right leg work better (maybe from kicking the soccer ball). I’ve been warped from racing on a track, circling forever with my left shoulder tilted to the curve. I have incongruous little buckets of fat at my midsection even when I’m at my skinniest racing weight. Still, when I run, I try to keep as synchronized as possible. I think of energy flowing in a straight line between my lower back and the base of my skull. I try to land equally on the left side and the right side. When I run around Prospect Park, I alternate directions: clockwise, counterclockwise, clockwise. If no one else is on a track, I run it in reverse, with my right shoulder aimed into the curve. Being a parent also led me to discover what I consider the ideal form of cross-training. I wrestled endlessly with my three boys. I carried them, flipped them, and played a game called “blind monster,” in which they would run across mats laid around our apartment and I would try to tackle them while on my knees with my eyes closed.
Most of what I know about writing, I’ve learned through running every day. —HARUKI MURAKAMI
Hansen’s suicide left a wound in my father’s mind that never healed. It’s hard to lose a friend; it’s harder to lose someone you think of as a twin; it’s harder still if it happens in your own garage; and it’s even worse if you can’t drop the thought that it could have, or should have, been you. My father would obsess about Hansen’s death for the rest of his life. He wondered what else he could have done, and he wondered what else Hansen could have done. He believed that Hansen had been too closeted, too focused on keeping up appearances, too uptight. And it was from this moment on that my father decided to do the opposite. He would be flamboyant and open. In later years, my father would often measure his own struggles against Hansen’s, as if trying to calculate his distance from the abyss.
Study after study has shown that aerobic exercise reduces the risk of all cardiovascular diseases, improves mental health, and likely increases lifespan. One of my favorite sentences comes from a meta-study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. “Running, even 5 to 10 minutes a day, and at slow speeds, is associated with markedly reduced risks of death from all causes and cardiovascular disease.” If you’re able to run but you haven’t run today, find some time just to go around the block.
It wasn’t the only time he threatened to kill himself to wrangle a couple of hundred dollars out of me. Just as if he were a child, I knew that he loved me deeply and needed me, but I could only handle the manipulation in doses. Families are the only relationships that are permanent by definition. You can lose a best friend or leave a spouse. But your father will always be your father. This creates different obligations, frustrations, and kinds of love. It made me respond with empathy, but not in an unlimited amount.
Our lean muscle mass declines with age, which is bad for marathoners and even worse for sprinters. We lose what is called peak propulsive force, meaning the power with which we push our feet into the ground. Our maximum heart rate declines. But as we train, over time, the mitochondria inside our muscle cells become more efficient at converting energy. New blood vessels develop. Tendons strengthen. We should, perhaps, get wiser.
There was one variable I could truly improve: time spent running fast. I wasn’t doing remotely enough work to improve one of the key metrics of running: VO2 max, a number that describes the body’s ability to move oxygen through the blood during intense exercise. Or to put it in a formula: maximum milliliters of oxygen consumed in one minute divided by bodyweight in kilograms. Nor was I doing enough to improve my lactate threshold, a measure of the body’s ability to move without the amount of lactate increasing in the blood. If VO2 max is equivalent to a car’s engine size, a runner’s lactate threshold is the red line on the tachometer. I needed to improve both. VO2 max improves mostly through speed workouts—running quarter-miles, or miles, to the point of near exhaustion, resting briefly, and then running them again. Lactate threshold improves most through what are called threshold runs: running at a pace that’s tiring but where you can still talk, at least a little.
But on Tuesdays I added focused runs to tax my VO2 max, and on Thursdays or Fridays I added threshold runs. I started doing core workouts that Holder prescribed for me. A couple of times, I met him in gyms in Manhattan and he’d teach me how to properly do exercises I’d long neglected, from airplanes to pull-ups to Z-presses. He was astonished to learn how little I knew and to discover that I had the flexibility of the Tin Man.
Kirby’s training philosophy matched in many ways my favorite philosophy of playing music, often ascribed to Charlie Parker: learn all the theory you can, but forget it when you play. He wanted me to gather data. And he talked to me about “bottlenecks.” Every runner has unique limitations: some physiological, some psychological, some biomechanical. The key isn’t to try to improve everything at once, but to identify the current constraint and work to remove it. “You remove one bottleneck,” he told me, “and then there’s another. You only do what’s necessary, so you widen your bottle to the next one.” But as you do all that, he said, you have to stay in touch with why you love the sport. He was like a math wizard who also studied Zen philosophy. “I want the athlete to feel it,” he said. “I don’t want them to chase a metric on some device.”
I shouldn’t just be avoiding bad foods. I should be actively seeking out good ones. I started to log every meal and every snack, a process that increases discipline in and of itself. I created a special breakfast that I ate every day, filling a huge glass container with seven days’ worth of oatmeal, nuts, chia seeds, flaxseed, wheat germ, and bits of dried fruit. I shook it up every morning and poured a bowl that I topped with fresh fruit and milk. I usually followed that with a glass of green juice to help my gut and my immune system. I took L-citrulline pills, which Holder said would help with recovery. I tossed kale salads with protein and as many different colored vegetables as I could at lunch. At dinner, I joined in whatever we were eating as a family and tried to steer it in as healthy a way as I could. If we ordered burritos, I’d get a vegetarian one in a whole wheat tortilla without cheese or sour cream. I’d try to limit myself to one beer or glass of wine in the evening and then reach for kombucha if I wanted a second. The body builds and repairs muscle while we sleep, so I started to drink protein shakes before bed. I bought a two-liter water bottle and tried to finish it before I left work each evening. Holder also instructed me to drink beet juice every day. Beets contain nitrates, which your body converts into nitric oxide. Nitric oxide seems to increase blood flow and stamina. I ordered a case, stashed the little bottles in the fridge, and started popping one every morning. They tasted like sludge, and it was unnerving to pee red, but that seemed well worth it if I could get just a tiny bit faster.
As I go, my brain is measuring all this and running a series of complex calculations just out of reach of my conscious mind. We often think of pain as something that happens in our bodies and then travels to our minds. That’s true if you slide off a slippery rock and your ankle snaps. But I don’t think the pain in running usually works this way. Instead, as a number of scientists have recently shown—and as two of my favorite authors, Alex Hutchinson and Steve Magness, have written—pain is also a psychological phenomenon. We feel it because the brain is telling the body to stop or slow because it’s worried. The sports physiologist and ultrarunner Tim Noakes has called this phenomenon “the Central Governor Model.” The title of his highly influential paper laying out this theory begins: “Fatigue is a brain-derived emotion.”
The goal of training isn’t to try to unplug the thermostat, which is there for a reason. In a creative, if slightly psychotic, 2008 study, researchers gave cyclists fentanyl to block feedback during a time trial on exercise bikes. The riders had no understanding of their level of exertion so they rode at blistering speeds, faded precipitously, and couldn’t walk afterward. That’s what happens when the thermostat is off. Instead, my goal in training is to strengthen and stress all the systems that the thermostat is measuring to the same degree that those systems will be stressed on race days. I run down mountains, which tears my quads the way they’ll tear on race day. I do 20-mile runs without drinking water or eating breakfast so that my glycogen stores and hydration levels will reach the levels of depletion I’ll hit when I have prepared properly and run 26.2. I run when it’s hot, when it’s cold, when it’s humid, when it’s dark, when I’m hungry, and when I’m full. I run loads of miles at 5:30 pace even when I’m planning to run the race at 5:50 pace. I do this all for physical reasons: I want my body to be stronger, so it sends fewer signals to the thermostat. But I’m also doing it for psychological reasons. I don’t want depletion of any of these systems to scare my brain. I want the bottlenecks to be wider and the thermostat set higher.
My mother wasn’t particularly concerned with my various time goals. They were just numbers. She cared whether I was happy and that I had what I needed. She filled the fridge with beet juice before I arrived, because she knew I liked to drink it, but she had no idea how to answer when a friend of hers asked her how fast I was likely to run. She thought it might have been under three hours, but she wasn’t sure. One of her greatest virtues has been her ability to maintain steadfast and absolute love for me along with total indifference to my win-loss record. She must have driven me to 200 soccer games and tennis tournaments when I was a child. She always got me there on time with my gear properly packed. But I don’t remember her being concerned, a single time, with the score. She had come to watch me run the Boston Marathon once before and expressed surprise that I had just zipped by and waved. “I thought you were going to stop and chat,” she said afterward.
Anyone can give a runner a workout. But training is not math. Finley knew that a coach has to understand a runner’s mind too.
Finley built a program that would work with my whole life, which is what the best kind of coach should do. “A big piece of my coaching philosophy is how can we accomplish that holistic experience from having a great family to doing great work? How does running add to all of this? And it should never stand in the way. My job is to make sure you can do all of this at a high level. It’s not that you just have that one goal. It’s all the goals.” This was a profound insight, and it was, in retrospect, the only kind of coaching that would have worked for me. Running has never been the most important thing in my life. I’ve always cared more about family, about work, about many things. A coach who didn’t see or couldn’t accept that could never have gotten the best out of me. That’s part of why I failed under Lananna and succeeded under Finley.
We basically have a deal. I try my best to make my obsession as minimally disruptive as possible. She rolls with the disruption and knows that I’ll make it up to her in other ways. We have a marriage with balance, love, and trade-offs. Danielle and my children also understand both what running means to me and that I never let it become the thing that matters most. I might run while my kids warm up for their soccer games, and I might do planks during halftime. But when the game begins, I’m on the sideline cheering as loud as anyone else.
I entered a half-marathon in Brooklyn and flew across Prospect Park and down Ocean Parkway at a 5:30 pace. I sprinted across the Coney Island Boardwalk and finished in 1:11, by far my fastest time at that distance. Sometimes success feels impossible; sometimes it feels inevitable.
My personal best had improved by four minutes in 12 years of relentless work. Now, with Finley’s help, I was aiming to take it down by 10 minutes in 12 months, at an age where I was closer to social security than to college. Finley methodically planned workouts to slowly shift my physiology and my psychology too. He plotted everything out in a new Google Doc with workouts 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. On Fridays, I’d run a little bit longer and a little bit faster than usual. Every Sunday, I’d run long but not hard. I started doing short sprints after runs to increase the power of my stride. The point of the workouts was to tire me but not to obliterate me. There would be another workout in two days. As Ernest Shackleton famously remarked, it’s better to be a live donkey than a dead lion.
I ran 20 x 200 meters all-out on a track in Columbus, Georgia, where I was giving a speech about trends in technology. I was feeling great, and I had a month and a half to go before the Chicago Marathon. The next six weeks were a period of precision and obsession. I monitored my weight, my heart rate, and my diet. I visualized each workout. I made sure to sleep eight hours a night. One day, Finley prescribed “5 mile progressive tempo starting at 5:50–5:30, 2 min rest, followed by 2 x 1 mile @ 5:20 with 2 min rest.” I ran the five miles of the tempo run in 5:50, 5:44, 5:39, 5:32, and 5:26, and then I ran the two single miles in 5:16 and 5:09. One of the wonderful things about being in top shape is how in touch I feel with my body: I could run a mile on a flat road and, without looking at my watch, tell how fast I had run more or less to the second. I had expected to run the final mile of that workout in 5:10 and felt pleasantly surprised when my watch said 5:09. Finley wasn’t just structuring the workouts to make me faster; he was also subtly training good racing habits. He always directed me to run the last mile faster than the first one. This is how you should run a marathon too.
The morning of the Chicago Marathon, I woke in my hotel and checked the weather report for the hundred and seventh time. Everything was perfect: it was cold and clear with little wind. 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. I watched my favorite race video: the great Kenyan Olympic champion Sammy Wanjiru outkicking his rival on the Chicago course nine years prior. Then I made my way to the start.
After I ran 2:29, I tried to think deeply about why I had run so fast. Some reasons were obvious: I had run more miles, and I had run them hard. I wore carbon-plated shoes and drank beet juice. Some explanations were buried deeper. Steve Finley had wanted to unlock a younger version of me, and he had subtly done it. He had realized, just by talking to me on the phone in that first conversation, that I had more talent than I thought. But he couldn’t tell me that directly. He had to guide me to that realization
I drove home in agony wondering, as most runners do with all injuries, whether it would be gone the next day or whether it would end my running career. There’s a certain warm satisfaction that comes with both thoughts. Back at my laptop, I did the natural thing of diagnosing myself via Reddit and LetsRun.com, which of course led to the conclusion that I would likely be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. But the pain went away, and I was back running by the middle of the next week.
“Did you sleep oddly the night before? Maybe in a car?” I had, she diagnosed, injured my psoas muscle, and I would be fine.
The night before the race, I sat in my hotel room in Eugene and tried to work through my normal pre-race routine. I laid out my uniform: Nike half-tights and my paper-thin green singlet with Wired emblazoned on the back. I ate a pre-race dinner of salted bread with almond butter and a beet salad. I drank cup after cup of water, filled at the bathroom sink. I clipped my toenails, shaved the tiny hairs off the tops of my feet, and scraped all the dirt off my racing shoes. Maybe I could save one second by doing all this; maybe I’d need that second; maybe the simple act would just give me a little motivation at the end. I lay flat on my back on the hotel bed, looked upward, and tried to visualize the course and how I would move through it. I would do this, I planned, until I fell asleep.
This was a variation on a common worry of mine: Does my running detract from my family and my work? Every now and then, I think I should take all my carbon-plated racing shoes and lock them in the attic. Running can be selfish and a waste of time. It wears out the skin and possibly the heart. I couldn’t be the perfect parent, or the perfect CEO, even if I had 25 hours in a day. How can I possibly hope to be so if I only really have 23?
There are lots of physiological differences between running 50 miles and running 26 or even 31. In a marathon, you burn almost entirely glycogen, particularly if you plan your nutrition right. In a 50-miler, your body becomes a metabolic omnivore—devouring glycogen, proteins, and fats—so you have to train your body to be efficient in this process and you need to train your gut to take in more food than you normally would. You can reach states of dehydration and energy depletion that you don’t get near in a marathon. You have to deal, too, with different kinds of muscle soreness and breakdown. More important, there’s a kind of deep mental fatigue that makes your mind feel like it’s wrapped in steel wool. Marathon runners get tired and miserable, but they rarely get so disoriented and exhausted that they have to step off the course, lay their heads in the moss, and take a nap. Marathons are also generally linear: you run the same speed the whole way; or you run slower and slower after a certain point. Ultramarathons, as I would eventually learn, don’t work that way. You can run fast and then slow and then fast again.
I don’t yet know what my children will take from me, and it doesn’t seem fair to speculate. They are still too young. They have their own lives and dreams, and my objective in parenting is to try to support them as best I can in the lives they want to live. They’re very different boys. I’m sure that, once they’re adults, I’ll be able to see the ways in which Danielle and I shaped them for good and for ill. I’m sure they’ll have theories about the ways we stunted them or led them astray.
when parents begin to use their children’s successes as fungible substitutes for their own failures, the child first squirms and then rebels.
A parent has one obligation to their children: unending love. They don’t have to agree with every choice the child makes. They don’t have to go to every track meet. They can demand things and refuse things. They can build a dam in a cold stream with the kid, or they can sit by the side and read. They can send a vague, loving note when their child turns 21, or a deep, incisive one. There’s no blueprint and there’s only one rule: the kids get to decide if the parent meets the standard. I was blessed by fate to have two parents who weren’t meant to be with each other but who were each entirely devoted to me. That is worth forgiving a lot in exchange.
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. Maybe they’ll write about these days on the track or running around the park, in anger. Or maybe they’ll find that they love the sport too. One day, off in the future, if I’m lucky, I’ll be handing one of them a gel on Atlantic Avenue or offering a new pair of shoes on the downside of the Queensboro Bridge. Maybe the passion will skip a generation, but I’ll still end up drinking beet juice with my grandkids. My father led a deeply complicated and broken life. But he gave me many things, including the gift of running—a gift that opens the world to anyone who accepts it.
There are a lot of reasons why I run. I like the mental space it gives me. I like setting goals and trying to meet them. I like the feeling of my feet hitting the ground and the wind in my hair. I like to remember that I’m still alive, and that I survived my cancer. I think it makes me better at my job. But I run because of my father. Running connects me to my father; it reminds me of my father; and it gives me a way to avoid becoming my father.
I want to start by thanking my wife, Danielle, the love of my life. She was the first reader on the manuscript and the person who, for thirty years, has coped with this rather intense hobby of mine.