A Labrador in a Race for Wolves
I think about many things during the week, seldom about my father,
but when I sit down to do something so serious as to write about my
thoughts, I can only write about him.
—
W. SCOTT THOMPSON , DIARY ENTRY, MARCH 31, 1974.
For years, I stuck to marathons. In 2021, though, I decided to try something at least a touch longer. My friend Josh Cox was then the agent to one of my running idols, the Olympian Desiree Linden. She had spent the period of Covid lockdowns training like she had lost a bet while playing beer-pong. In October of 2020, she had run one mile on the first day of the month, two on the second, and so on, until she ran 31 miles on the 31st.
Now, Cox told me, she was going to try to set the world record in the 50K, a distance just over 31 miles. Would I be interested in helping to pace her? The women’s world record of 3:07 was just one minute off the men’s American record in my age group. Most of the major marathons were still canceled. I said I was in.
Technically, an “ultramarathon” is any race longer than a marathon, and a 50K perhaps shouldn’t count. It’s like someone who boasts of wanting to see the world beyond America—and then goes to Toronto. But to me, it was still an unknown frontier. The age-group record was held by Michael Wardian, a legend of ultrarunning who had won the Delaware Marathon when I had run it in 2005. My coach Steve Finley made me a schedule that wasn’t much different from what I had used before my break-through race in Chicago a year and a half before. My long runs got a little longer. My tempo intervals stretched out a little farther. The complexity increased. One day, I ran five miles at roughly my marathon pace; I rested for five minutes and then ran six half-miles at my half-marathon pace. In the middle of the training, I started my new job as CEO of The Atlantic. I took one week off between jobs, during which I managed to get in a particularly grueling workout.
The race was scheduled for early April, but the exact day wouldn’t be locked in until the very end. Cox had selected a flat course in Oregon, where he knew the weather would be cool.
He’d blocked out a couple of days, and we’d run whenever conditions seemed best. He couldn’t have too many people in the race because Covid was still a threat. As the race approached, Linden’s goal got more ambitious. She didn’t just want the record; she wanted to break three hours. This meant that I’d be useless as a pacer; she needed someone quicker. Josh told me to come anyway. I’d be behind her, but I could try to run the fastest time by a man over 45.
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.
Something was scaring me, though. I was worried about something more than the possibility of failure and something less than the possibility of death. I didn’t know how this lean, imperfect body that I inhabited could cross that much ground at such a pace. I texted Brett Kirby, the Nike sports scientist, and asked him what I should do late in the race. Kirby was smart enough to know that I wasn’t really texting him about what to do late in the race. What you are about to do, he said, is hard. Don’t focus on that. Focus on something that you’ve done before that’s harder. Change it, he suggested, to “less than something else bigger.” I began to think about the workouts I had done, on little sleep and on smoggy streets, at speeds much faster than I would have to run the next day. I thought about the Escarpment Run, a grueling mountain race I had run in the Catskills. I sent him another note asking why, when drafting, it’s useful to have runners behind you as well as ahead of you. He explained that every runner creates a little air bubble that can actually give a slight push to the runner ahead. I smiled and drifted off to sleep.
The next morning, Finley drove me out to the start. He had brought a bicycle so that he could accompany me. I warmed up in the parking lot and marveled at the running royalty who had shown up for this tiny race on a cold day in April on the Row River. One of the pacers was Peter Bromka, a 2:19 marathoner and a terrific writer. The race director was Ian Dobson. He had been a star at Stanford and then an Olympian. Ryan Hall, the fastest American marathoner of all time, was there too. He had taken up weightlifting and trans- formed himself from a string bean to a baked potato. He told me that he wanted to become the first person to deadlift 500 pounds and then run a five-minute mile. Linden was warming up with her pacer, Charlie Lawrence, a qualifier for the Olympic Trials marathon. She wore red sunglasses and a fluorescent-yellow Brooks singlet. She looked ripped and ready. She’s 5’1” and 100 pounds of muscle: a tiny tactical missile with a ponytail.
We lined up, many of us wearing face coverings that we would pull down after the crowded start. I didn’t want to run alone, so I fell in behind a little group that included Chirine Njeim, a Lebanese runner who had competed in three winter Olympics in alpine skiing and was now trying to qualify for her second summer Olympics in the marathon. Hall was coaching Njeim, and he led her on bike. She wanted music, so another biker was carrying a boombox. About three miles in, I made my best decision of the race. We were running 5:53s, only four seconds faster than my goal pace, but something felt wrong. I slowed and told Finley that I was going to leave this little pack.
When I look back, I can remember the moment and the choice. But I can’t explain precisely what I felt or how I knew. I could just tell that my body was working a little too hard for the task
Ahead. The course was on a narrow bike path through a forest of ponderosa pines. It was flat, quiet, and cool, just the conditions you need to run fast. Cox had called it a “no excuses” day. I concentrated on my mantras: right foot, left foot, right foot, and steadied my pace as I’ve never steadied it before. I felt strong, as though I was running through an Escher staircase with a very faint downward slope. We traveled 6.5 miles straight out, and then looped around a pylon and went back. This meant that, four times, I passed Linden going the other direction. “Go Des,” I’d shout. “Go Nick,” she’d respond.
I passed 10 miles in 59:25, and then ran the next 10 in 59:21. I passed Njeim and the boombox and pulled myself back into the quiet. Finley pedaled a little bit ahead, saying almost nothing. He knew that I was in control. I tried to concentrate on him and the road. Whenever we passed the tall trees, I would look up and try to draw energy from them. I’d think of how old they were and all the wind and sunlight that had passed through them. I’d ask for some of that strength to keep pushing me forward.
After two full loops, I crossed the marathon line and turned around again. This time the pylon would be just two-and-a-half miles away. Linden came scorching by for the final time. She looked like a Corvette ZL1 driving south while I felt like a Honda Odyssey chugging north. “Go, Des!” “Go, Nick!” My third 10- mile block was 59:27. Soon the finish was in sight. I sprinted. Linden had already broken the tape, set a world record, and then wandered off to the side to puke. I was two minutes ahead of the old record for my age group, so Cox pulled out the tape again. I surged toward it, racing some runner in the future who will be trying to beat my time. My mind had narrowed completely: like I was running through a straw just barely wide enough for me to finish. I crossed the finish in 3:04:36.
Twenty-eight years before, on a track in Deerfield, Massachusetts, I had run in a primal way, screaming inside, and giving it everything a young man could. I crossed the line and then the lights went out. It was a nine-minute race and I was one teenager chasing another. Now I was 45, I’d been running for three hours, and I was chasing a time. But in those last moments of the race, I remembered that green track 28 years before. When we’re teenagers, we’re pulled by instinct and our emotions are thunderstorms that sweep away hillsides inside our minds. Now my emotions were those of an older man: a steady rain that formed a river pushing relentlessly forward. I had planned, prepared, and executed. I had used the skills I had learned in a lifetime of running and a lifetime of focused work to run the best race of my life. I didn’t scream inside like I had on the Deerfield track, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t feel as intensely. Right after I crossed the line, I started to wobble and then I toppled over.
Eventually I steadied myself and gave Steve a big hug. Then I stumbled over to congratulate Des. I changed from my singlet into a black Boston Bruins T- shirt. Tradition holds that after setting a record, you should drink champagne out of your running shoes. It was a Brooks event, and I had run in Nikes. Des’s husband asked whether I would like to drink out of his running shoes. I was committed to the project but not so much that I would take down a shot of my new friend’s toe sweat. I held my hand over the Nike swoosh as I poured champagne down my own shoes.
My new Atlantic colleagues mostly learned about the race from Twitter. Many of them had some sense that I was a runner, but they didn’t know the depth of my passion. I was a little proud, naturally, but also worried. Would they see this sport as a frivolous distraction from my serious new job? The Atlantic was founded in 1857 by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and other great trinomial luminaries of the 19th century to try to save American democracy in the years before the Civil War. The magazine had thrived, for the most part, for 150 years. But the company had very publicly laid off 20% of its employees six months before I was hired. Should the skinny new CEO really be running 50Ks in a green singlet in Lane County, Oregon? Shouldn’t he perhaps be meeting with advertisers in New York?
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?
But that thought passes. Running has become part of my day where I disconnect from screens and let my mind drift usefully and turn over problems. It encourages simple habits—healthy sleep, healthy eating, moderate drinking— that help as much at 8 a.m. meetings as they do at 6 a.m. runs. It taught me to have total trust in the compound interest gained by steady day-by-day work. I got fast by running hard, consistently, and wasting very little time worrying about how ambitious my goals were. I had learned that time spent fretting about a task is almost always better spent doing the task. I had also succeeded because I had learned, through practice, how to stay calm under stress. I had saved my race by backing off early when the pace was ever-so- slightly too fast. I had just steadily run mile after mile, right up to my physical limit. I had learned this way of modulating effort through intense office work and intense running.
There were some deeper lessons, too. To improve at running, you have to make yourself uncomfortable and push yourself to go at speeds that seem too fast. You need, from time to time, to move out into the “lane of high hopes.” The same is true in a complicated job. I had learned that our minds create limits for us when we’re afraid of failure not because it’s actually time to slow or stop. Which had done more to shape my mind: running or work? I don’t know. But I do think that those two parts of my life are now deeply intertwined.
My record was a footnote. I had run a slightly obscure distance at a slightly obscure age. Half the people in that Oregon parking lot had done something more impressive at some point in their running careers. Still, I had done something faster than anyone recorded had done it before. The man whose record I had broken was a true legend of the sport. I had done something that showed I was strong at an age when so many men worry about feeling weak. A few months after I set the record, I told my son James that I was worried that Wardian would run faster and get it back. “Then I won’t get to brag about you anymore,” he said in his sweet 7-year-old voice. “And then you’ll have to do it again,” said his older brother Ellis.
