Author Talks: How a CEO got faster in his 40s

Nick Thompson ran his first fast marathon in 2005, then spent the next decade clocking almost exactly the same time—race after race, year after year. But at age 43, grieving his father and beginning to train with an elite coach, something shifted: He started getting faster. In this edition of Author Talks, Thompson—now CEO of The Atlantic—talks with McKinsey Global Publishing’s Lucia Rahilly about The Running Ground: A Father, A Son, and the Simplest of Sports (Random House/Penguin Random House, Fall 2025) and what running taught him about resilience, loss, and the kind of discipline that helps you keep improving long after you expected to plateau. An edited version of their conversation follows.

The book seems to be an odyssey toward acceptance of your father, who, by all accounts, was brilliant and, for a time, very successful. Your father also had a turbulent and complex personality.

My father, Scott Thompson, was an amazing character. He grew up in Oklahoma, had an overbearing dad, and wanted to get out. He heard about Phillips Academy, applied, and obtained a scholarship.

Though he was behind and struggled, he worked very hard and received a scholarship to Stanford. There, he became a rock star and won the Rhodes Scholarship. He brought John F. Kennedy to campus, and Kennedy thought, “This kid’s going to be president.”

Then my father married into my mother’s family, a prominent Washington, DC, family. But life didn‘t work. He drank too much, and his career never got on track.

In the early ‘80s, when my father was about 40 years old, he realized that he was gay and came out. From then on, his life was complicated and chaotic. He was amazing, interesting, and well-read. He was smart and creative, but he drank excessively. He ended up becoming a bankrupt tax fugitive who owed a lot of money. He died surrounded by 18-year-old guys he met online.

My father was a complicated figure, but he was the guy who taught me to run. And running was one of the ways that we connected throughout his life. That was my dad. And he was a big part of the book.

You describe your running as a bidirectional dynamic with your dad: running toward him, to connect with him in life and remember him after his death, and running away, to avoid becoming like him.

Running was one of the ways we connected. We ran together through his 40s and 50s, as long as he could. Then, he rooted for me so hard when I began running and started to get good.

My dad would tell me that he had taken pills, was killing himself, but if I would just send him $1,000, it would be OK. I would send him the money, and he‘d say, “OK. Thanks.” People often ask how I forgave him.

When you have something that’s clearly good for you, how many people in your life are 100 percent happy [for you]? For example, my book is a bestseller. I’ve noticed that some of my closest friends are 90 percent happy; my colleagues are 85 percent happy. My dad was 100 percent happy for everything good that ever happened to me, without question. He was never competitive, never resentful. For my whole life, he was there in that way. My father caused a lot of chaos and unhappiness. But he truly loved me. And I forgive a lot for that.

You describe your father’s relationship with running as a gravitational force that held him together to a degree—until it didn’t. You’ve had periods in your life where you haven’t been able to run. How did you feel about that vulnerability?

In 2005, I ran my first fast marathon. I completed the marathon in two hours and 43 seconds [2:43]. The week afterward, there was a lump in my throat, and I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Treatment would last another six months: I had two surgeries and radiation.

People will most likely survive thyroid cancer. Yet it wiped me out, and I couldn’t run. I was obsessed with returning and trying to run fast again. It took a while, but two years later, I ran the New York Marathon again—13 seconds faster than before my diagnosis. That was amazing. So how did I feel when I couldn’t run? I felt very scared that I would never be able to run again and that life would be completely different, that I’d never be strong again.

As the illness receded into the rearview mirror, I felt better, but often I would think about it when I was running. What I would do if I didn’t run? Let’s say I were to trip down the escalator and break my leg. I would try to find something that does what running does for me. Running gets me outside. It gives me a regular daily practice. Running is something that I do every day that enforces a sense of discipline and a type of stoicism that’s useful in life.

I could replicate those things—say, by playing guitar, practicing chess, or bird watching. But I don’t know if I could ever replicate the amazing feeling you get when you’re training right on the edge of the red line. Your body hurts all the time, but not in a way that feels like you’re injuring yourself. Your quads hurt, not because you’ve overdone it but because they’re getting stronger. I love that feeling. I’ll miss that whenever my hard running is over.

Your dad told you that life fractures in your 40s. So when you approached that birthday, after having gotten faster after cancer, you were facing a looming threat of life falling apart at the age your father experienced this type of unspooling. How did you navigate that, and what happened?

My dad had a theory. When I turned 40, he very kindly posted on my Facebook page of 60,000 to 70,000 followers: “Hey, Nick. Happy birthday. It seems like things are going great. But you should know that every man’s life falls apart at 40. It happened to your grandfather. It happened to me. Sure hope it doesn’t happen to you.”

And his theory was that at this point in life, you have all these pressures. You‘re helping take care of your parents. You’re probably taking care of your children. You’re supposed to be at your professional apex. But you’ve now reached the point where you realize you will not fulfill the dreams you had in your 20s. In fact, everything will be harder from this point on.

I thought, “Thanks for posting, Dad. Love you, too.” But it made me realize that I would not let my life fall apart at 40. My father passed away when I was 42. When I was 43, I was clearly mourning him through running, and I received an email from Nike about its running program, which trains civilians with elite coaches. I thought about what my father would say. He’d say, “Do it.” Or “just do it,” as the case may be.

So I started training with the elite coaches. Suddenly, after ten years of running marathons at a consistent time—at 2:43, 2:43, 2:42, 2:42, 2:43, 2:44, 2:45, 2:46, 2:43—I steadily improved my marathon time, from 2:38, to 2:34, then 2:29, the top-ranked number in the world.

There are some deep reasons for it. I had to overcome feeling like I could never be faster than I had been before I was sick. It was partly my processing the death of my father and the realization that age pushes you backward, but wisdom pushes you forward. Whatever it is you want to get better at—that you feel like age is making you worse at—if you focus and train, you can run harder into the wind than the wind is pushing you backward.

I became a much better runner. April 2025 was probably the best race I ran in my life. I ran the fastest time in the world on the 50-mile race [Jack Bristol Lake Waramaug Ultra Races in Connecticut]. In fact, I ran 15 minutes faster for the first 26.2 miles in that race than I did months later. I was 49 then. Maybe my dad had the timing wrong. The lesson is that your life falls apart at 50.

Your wife calls your coach, Steve Finley, the hero of the book. You talk a lot about the benefits of coaching, as we do here in our professional context. Are you able to coach junior people at work?

Yes, of course. I have 11 direct reports. I talk to most of them every day and try to understand their strengths, how they could improve, and how they could evolve. What responsibilities can they be given? What are their weaknesses? I work hard at trying to help them get better. One practice that I’ve been pretty successful at is working incredibly hard and with incredible focus at the office. I bring in a lot of people who work directly with me for a year or two, and then they go off into the rest of the organization. They kill it in their new position, whatever the role—assistant, chief of staff, deputy chief of staff.

If you were to survey the organization and ask, “Who are the hardest workers?” they are many of the people who are clearest about their roles and who have worked with me for years. That’s partly because I overindex on hiring that kind of person. And it’s also because we have a culture in the CEO office where that’s what everybody does. That culture hasn’t spread to the whole organization, but that work ethic is still helpful.

Your description of coaching made me think about how Steve Finley focuses on goals.

This is super important. Finley is the man who took over my training when I was 43. He created a Google Doc of what I was supposed to do every day. There would be a 12-week buildup before the race. His Google Doc would indicate what to do in week one, then week two. Finley would adjust the regimen each week, and I would write notes about what I’d done.

Interestingly, he’d advise some runners to run seven miles at a 7:30 pace on Monday, complete 15 minutes of planks and core work, and do the glute and hip strength workout in the Nike app. For me, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday are run options. Saturday or Sunday is a run option. Finley recognizes that my life is super busy and that I will not do what he can do.

But what matters is Tuesday. Tuesday is 12 by 800 at 2:50 down to 2:35. Thursday matters because it is four by two miles at 5:45 with a 90-second recovery. Sunday matters because it’s 18 miles with whatever.

Finley recognizes that it is the maximum instruction and pressure he can put on me without overwhelming the system, given that running is my third priority after work and family.

That’s in total contrast to Vin Lananna, my coach when I attended college at Stanford. Lananna was probably the most successful track coach in American history. At every school where he worked, he won a national championship. Lananna demands total commitment. If you stay up late studying for a chemistry test and then don’t perform well at a workout, you’re in the doghouse. That approach was never going to work for me. I wanted to run well, and I cared about it, but not as much as the other kids did. I would never have been able to give Lananna the commitment he needed, whereas Finley figured out what I could do and what I couldn’t do—how to push as hard as he could without me breaking. And that’s why my wife said, “That guy saw something.”

You describe the ability to differentiate between when worry and fear are warranted versus your brain creating ‘noise.’ At work, we’ve all experienced what might feel like burnout. What are your tactics for distinguishing when worry is warranted?

In running, there are all kinds of pain. There’s fake pain, where your body is just afraid and sends pain signals. For example, I enter a race saying, “My hamstring is so messed up.” I run the marathon, and my hamstring feels great during the race and afterward. In that case, it’s just my brain messing with me.

There’s injury pain, where your knee hurts because you’ve inflamed the muscles above the knee, and they’re pressing against the nerves. There’s also good pain, which is what I described about training. Learning to distinguish between the different kinds of pain is really important.

So, it’s a good metaphor for work when there’s a crisis. When something bad is happening, one of the skills of being good at your job is saying, “OK, that’s real. I made a bad decision, and now I’m going to work on fixing that decision. Now we have to lock in and pay attention.” Learning to distinguish these signals in your job, your work, and your stress makes a really big difference, and sometimes you get it wrong.

I remember walking into the office [at a former position], and something was happening on social media related to one of our stories. When our communications head phoned me, I thought, “That’s stupid. Doesn’t matter.” I thought no one would care about a ridiculous reading of our piece. After I finished a series of meetings, someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Now look at your phone.” And I thought, “I should have dealt with that two hours ago.” Getting those things right is so important. It’s akin to understanding the pain while you run.

Part of it is about knowing how much to say ‘yes’ to—knowing how much you can actually take on and when to step back. Finley seems to have helped you with that.

Yes, Finley did. I also learned a very good management lesson from Sheryl Sandberg [founder of Lean In] when I was starting as CEO at The Atlantic. Every year, she would come up with what are called “nongoals”: things that are really important but that you will not do. That means everything you do must be more important than your nongoals.

When I began working at The Atlantic, I said, “My nongoal is setting a video strategy for The Atlantic.” Video is important, but I realized that devising a strategy would be very hard. Every serious publication that does it has a hard time. We used to call it the “nine-figure audience, four-figure revenue problem.” That’s a nongoal. Everything that I worked on had to be more important than working on The Atlantic’s video strategy.

In running, I do the same thing. As I get deeper into a training cycle, I will only do a certain number of things, and I start removing others from my list. Early in a training cycle, I try to get to the point where I’m able to complete 50 push-ups or 100 push-ups. Late in a training cycle, I stop paying attention to that. That way, I’m only really focused on a couple of things at a time. And that’s an important lesson. The key is determining what matters and what doesn’t. Maybe The Atlantic would be far more profitable if we had a good video strategy. Now we are building one because we’ve crossed that threshold of making it possible. Now I have different nongoals.

McKinsey is poised to turn 100. The Atlantic is, of course, practically antediluvian, so you’ve had the experience of modernizing a legacy publication. How do you transform an entity with such a distinguished reputation into something that’s not only modern and relevant but also leading edge?

I report to the board, and the editorial team reports to the board. Everything must be a consensus. That makes it really hard. Also, Jeff Goldberg, the editor, is an amazing guy and one of my closest friends and colleagues. But Jeff is not a huge fan of the internet; he’s much more old school. Jeff loves the print magazine; he favors hardcore reporting. I consider AI amazing and cool. So there’s a little bit of tension. In order to evolve, we must agree.

And of course, there’s risk. We were founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. I spend a lot of my time thinking through how, in an age of agents, we meet readers in a way that has the maximum possible benefit and the minimal possible risk. People often suggest that we just do one thing or another. But we have to deal with the world as it is. That’s partly why we’ve had so much success. Jeff and I work incredibly well together. He sets his strategy, and then I build our business strategy after that.

You host a podcast called The Most Interesting Thing in AI. What do you think the most interesting thing in AI is?

Explainability—what’s going on with AI and how it works—is the most interesting, because no one understands it. I spend a lot of time with folks who have top jobs at top companies. They conduct experiments all the time. They explore what may work and what may not, and they can see it all getting better. But nobody knows [exactly] what’s happening.

For example, there is a paper about how Anthropic solves multiplication, which is unlike the way we solve multiplication. Somehow, it identifies the last digit of the answer, guesses the range, and then puts the two together to provide the correct answer. The process has nothing to do with how we’re taught in school. We’re building massively important brains—modeled after ours—that will rearrange society, but we don’t know what’s happening. We don’t know how our brains work, and we really don’t know how these things work. So that’s the most interesting thing in AI.

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