The Running Ground
A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports
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4.5 • 8 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A profound meditation on what running can teach us about our limits and our lives by a record-setting distance runner who is now the CEO of The Atlantic.
“This is not just an engaging memoir about running. It’s a meditation on what it takes to marshal and maintain motivation.”—ADAM GRANT, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Potential and Think Again
“Endlessly surprising, revelatory, and heart-rending.”—ANNA WINTOUR
For Nicholas Thompson, running has always been about something more than putting one foot in front of another. He ran his first mile at age five, using it as a way to connect with his father as his family fell apart. As a young man, it was a sport that transformed, and then shook, his sense of self-worth. In his 30s, it was a way of coping with a profound medical scare.
By his early 40s, Thompson had many accomplishments. He was the Editor in Chief of a major magazine; a devoted husband and father; and a passionate runner. But he was haunted by the recent death of his brilliant, complicated father and the crack-up that derailed his father’s life. Had the intensity and ambition he’d inherited made a personal crisis inevitable for him as well?
Then a chance offer gave him the opportunity to train for the Chicago Marathon with elite coaches. Giving himself over to the sport more fully than ever before, he discovered that aging didn’t necessarily put you on an unbroken trajectory of decline. For seven years after his father died, Thompson transforms his body to perform at its highest capacity, and the profound discipline and awareness he builds along the way changes every aspect of his life. Throughout the narrative, he weaves in stories of remarkable men and women who have used the sport to transcend some of the hardest moments in life.
The Running Ground is a story about fathers, sons, and the most basic and most beautiful of sports.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this pensive memoir, Atlantic CEO Thompson (The Hawk and the Dove) ruminates on the lessons he's learned from fatherhood and distance running. From the first time he ran a mile alongside his father at age five, running became a source of connection for the pair, with Thompson believing "it would both bring me closer to my father and help me to avoid becoming him." Thompson's childhood was bumpy: his father came out as gay while working for the Reagan administration, leaving his mother to raise the author largely on her own. As he recalls his sometimes strained efforts to keep his relationship with his father alive, he muses on teaching his own sons to run and shares proud anecdotes including the time one of his sons asked Joe Biden what his favorite book was during a CBS Mornings taping. Interspersed throughout are interviews with five professional runners (including Bobbi Gibb, the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, and Michael Westphal, a marathoner with Parkinson's) about the significance of the sport in their lives. The book's family angle is often more stimulating than Thompson's rapturous reflections on running, but he manages to weave everything into an appealing whole. It's a satisfying self-portrait.
