Nick Thompson on Grit, Growth, and the Miles That Matter | EP 683

In this powerful conversation, John R. Miles sits down with Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic and author of The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest Sport. Together, they explore how running became a thread through Nick’s life—a tool for resilience, self-discipline, and understanding his father’s complex legacy. From the early memories of running beside his dad during the American running boom to surviving thyroid cancer and breaking the three-hour marathon barrier, Nick shares how the sport has shaped his mind as much as his body. The discussion expands far beyond the track—touching on fatherhood, AI and authenticity, the psychology of limits, and how pain can be both teacher and truth-teller. This episode is a reminder that sometimes the hardest miles—whether in life or on the road—are the ones that teach us who we really are.👉 Read the full show notes: https://passionstruck.com/nick-thompson-the-miles-that-make-us-who-we-are/🎧 Listen + Watch + Go DeeperAll episode resources—including guest links, my books You Matter, Luma, and Passion Struck, The Ignited Life Substack, and the Start Mattering store—are gathered here:👉 linktr.ee/John_R_MilesTo learn more about Nick Thompson, visit nickthompson.comFuel your body with purposeGet 20% OFF BUBS Naturals Collagen — clean, NSF Certified, and veteran-founded. Use code PASSIONSTRUCK at bubsnaturals.comAfter checkout, tell them our show sent you! Feel younger, sharper, and stronger — from the inside outGet 20% OFF Mitopure Gummies from Timeline, powered by clinically proven Urolithin A. Head to timeline.com/passionstruckYour cells will thank you.🧠 About the EpisodeRunning as Identity: How movement connects memory, focus, and meaning. Breaking Mental Ceilings: The invisible limits that look like data but are really belief. Discipline and Flow: What marathons teach us about self-trust and persistence. Fatherhood and Legacy: How Nick’s turbulent relationship with his father shaped his resilience. Authenticity in the Age of AI: Why real voices matter in writing and leadership. Pain as Information: Learning to differentiate discomfort from danger. Join The Ignited Life CommunityIf this episode stirred something in you, The Ignited Life is where the transformation continues. Each week, I share behind-the-scenes insights, science-backed tools, and reflections to help you turn intention into action.🔗 Subscribe free at TheIgnitedLife.netSupport the MovementEveryone deserves to feel valued and important. Show it. Wear it. Live it. Visit StartMattering.comConnect with John Pre-Order The Mattering Effect: https://matteringeffect.com/Book John to Speak: https://johnrmiles.com/speaking/Keynotes, books, podcast, and resources: https://linktr.ee/John_R_MilesChildren’s Book — You Matter, Luma: https://youmatterluma.com/Substack:

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John R. Miles?

  Coming up next on Passion Struck.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  The other thing that's really important is this principle called cognitive offloading. And so that's the principle whereby, once you start to rely on a tool, a technological tool, to do something, you get worse at it, right? So you use a calculator all the time, you forget how to do long division. You use Waze, you forget how to navigate. That's fine, who cares? It's better to have a calculator do long division than we do long division. But when it comes to thinking and writing, I don't want to get worse at it. So I don't want to rely on an AI for it.

• 0:30John R. Miles?

  Welcome to Passion Struck. I'm your host, John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters. Each week, I sit down with changemakers, creators, scientists, and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning, heal what hurts, and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming. Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. Because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection, and impact is choosing to live like you matter.

• 1:18John R. Miles?

  Welcome back to Passion Struck, episode 683. I'm your host, John Miles, and I am so grateful you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or joining for the first time, thank you for being part of this growing movement to live more intentionally and unlock the power of matter. If this show has ever given you clarity, courage, or momentum, here's how you can help it grow. First, share this episode with someone who will find it meaningful and leave a five-star rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps more people discover Passion Struck and become part of this movement for intentional living. This week, we're continuing our series, The Forces That Shape Us, where we explore the unseen dynamics that define how we live, lead, and connect.

• 1:59John R. Miles?

  Earlier this week, Claude Silver helped us rediscover the power of belonging and emotional bravery at work. But there's another force, one that threads through all of them: endurance. Because the way we move through struggle, uncertainty, and self-doubt shapes who we become. To explore that, I'm joined by Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, longtime journalist and author of The Running Ground: A Father, A Son, and The Simplest Sport. Nick's story isn't just about running. It's about how movement helps us make sense of challenge, legacy, and the search for meaning. His journey through racing, fatherhood, and leadership mirrors the one so many

• 2:41John R. Miles?

  of us are on, finding rhythm, meaning, and endurance amid chaos. In today's conversation, we explore what running can teach us about failure, focus, and perseverance, how discipline becomes a language for self-respect, why endurance isn't about toughness, it's about trust, and how to find your stride when the path ahead feels uncertain. My hope is that by the end of this episode, you'll see your own challenges differently, not as obstacles to avoid, but as invitations to grow stronger, slower, and more intentional. For deeper reflection and companion prompts, subscribe to The Ignited Life at theignitedlife.net. It's where I share tools and insights for building resilience, purpose, and meaning, one intentional choice at a time.

• 3:24John R. Miles?

  Before we begin, a reminder that my upcoming children's book, You Matter Luma, is now available for pre-sale. Links are in the show notes. It's a story about courage, kindness, and the ripple effect of one small act, a message that resonates deeply with today's theme of persistence and purpose. Now, let's step into episode 683 with Nick Thompson. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin.

• 4:00John R. Miles?

  I am absolutely honored and thrilled today to bring you Nick Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic. Welcome, Nick, to Passion Struck. How are you today?

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Oh, thanks so much, John. I am thrilled to be here, delighted to talk with you.

• 4:12John R. Miles?

  You and I have something in common. We both grew up in our childhood, at least a part of it, in Chicago. And then, as I understand it, you attended Andover. What was young Nick like? Were you curious, rebellious, driven?

• 4:27Speaker 01

  I was pretty driven. I was pretty curious. I was rebellious in, a little bit rebellious in high school, like a little bit anti the system. I had hair down to here when I was at Andover, which sometimes surprises people. My kids laugh when they see my yearbook photographs. But I always had, I think one of the things that my father Gave to me, for better or for worse, but I think mostly for better, was the drive to succeed at the thing I was doing, or to really try hard. He was so deeply ingrained in what he believed was right for life that came to me and certainly had that when I was in high school.

• 5:08John R. Miles?

  Speaking of your father, I understand he loved to run. What's your earliest memory of watching your father do that? How did it make you feel about him?

• 5:16Speaker 01

  I was born in 1975 and my father started to run in the late 1970s. And this is the great American running boom. When the complete book of running comes out, you look at registrations for marathons, they skyrocket. And my dad at that time was in a little bit of a rut professionally, not living up to his early promise. He was struggling with alcohol and he starts running. And it gives him a feeling of self-confidence. And so in about 1980s, when I was five, he would take me out to run and we would go and we would run around. I was living in Brookline, Massachusetts and we would go and we would run out the door, around the block. I remember running a mile with him. I remember running to this place called Pine Manor College. Having had children, I can't quite square my memories with running like two or three miles with

• 5:59Speaker 01

  my dad with being five or six years old. But it must have been that because he left when I was six and a half. So I have all these memories of running with him. I must have been running a couple of miles with my dad when I was five years old.

• 6:12John R. Miles?

  My running actually started when I was in seventh grade. I had a paper route and I had it for a few years before that. And it was an afternoon paper route. But what I was finding was I wanted to play with my friends and stuff. And so walking the route wouldn't give me enough time to get back and study and play with my friends. I started to run or jog the route. And I grew up being a heavy set kid. And so it was also my ticket to getting skinny and getting healthy. So that's how I started into it. And it really became a huge passion for me.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  For a lot of people, it's they come into, some people come into running because they joined the track team. Some people come into running because it's like a good way to get around, right? You're like, oh, I don't know. Kenanisa Bikelé, right? Like runs to school. Ethiopia, Kenya, where people run for efficiency. My father's father used to hike seven miles in like the Arizona drylands to get to school. That gets you in shape and you learn about fitness in part because it gets you around.

• 7:18John R. Miles?

  Well, I mean, it certainly does that. And where you, growing up where you did and then going to Andover, you certainly had to deal with different conditions. I had to deal with them when I was in Pennsylvania, too. And I remember having to go out in the sleet, the snow. And funny enough, those were some of my favorite runs. Just because it made you like notice more, or it was just different. I don't know what it was about it. I almost look forward for moments like that.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Really, it increases the intensity of the run. If you go out and it's 100 degrees, or it's three below, or it's pouring rain, you feel more. It just, it heightens your awareness. It heightens all of your sensory perceptions and makes you more present in your run. It's the times where I like to run where it's like nice and cool, and there are times where I like to run where it's just madness out there.

• 8:08John R. Miles?

  Before we dive into your book, which is the main reason for you coming on the show today, and the book's name is The Running Ground: A Father, A Son, and The Simplest Sport. I did want to ask you a question about technology, given it's something you're also passionate about. So I have a ton of listeners who are Gen Z, like my son, who's 27.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:30John R. Miles?

  And my daughter is 21. And they all come to me with career advice because they're struggling right now in a lot of different ways, where to put their attention, because they're all very fearful of what technology is going to do to industries. And I wanted to ask you, since you're kind of in the middle of this, what would be your advice to someone who's coming out of college or a young adult right now?

• 8:55Speaker 01

  They have some obstacles and they have some advantages. So one of the obstacles is like we're seeing unemployment rates shift up for young people. And it seems, based on the data, that is partly because of AI. The bottom rung of career ladders is getting knocked out. Companies are hiring fewer people because AI or AI agents can do the work that young people traditionally do.

• 9:14John R. Miles?

  Right.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  So higher up the career ladder, we're seeing very few effects of AI. Lower down the career ladder, we are starting to see those impacts. So that's, works against young people.

• 9:24John R. Miles?

  Right.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  But working for them, they actually know how to use these systems because they all grew up using them. Ideally, they have used AI as a tutor, not as just a thing to do their homework. But they understand these models at a deeper level, so they should be able to learn the skills that come with AI. The lesson, I think, for young people and the lesson for future careers is that no one can foresee how AI is going to change businesses. And I don't know exactly which industries are going to change. I can give you a hypothesis, but I don't know for sure. But what I do know is that it's going to be jagged. It's going to input some industries and some professions here than others. And so the skill that you're going to need to cultivate is the ability to be flexible,

• 10:07Speaker 01

  right, to be able to move and to shift, right? And it expands our capabilities, right? If you're really good at design, AI also gives you like a little bit of that ability to code. If you're really good at coding, it gives you a little bit of ability to design. So individuals are going to have a broader skill set. And so what you should cultivate if you're young, and this is what I would tell my kids or a little younger than yours, come out, focus on what you're curious and passionate about, right? That's the thing. If you love it, you'll figure out a path to success. Be flexible and understand what AI is doing because people deeply want that. Every company wants people who are AI-nated, 100%.

• 10:41John R. Miles?

  Okay, and I have to ask you just one other question.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Sure, I love talking about this stuff.

• 10:45John R. Miles?

  Since you are right at the epicenter of writing, obviously, and I'm an author. I know one of the things in all my writing and especially being very involved on Substack is the impact of AI on kind of authenticity of writing.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:04John R. Miles?

  What are your thoughts in this space?

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Well, it's a huge question, both for me personally, right? Somebody who's just written a book, someone who's CEO of The Atlantic, where we have lots of writers. My view is that AI is a tool that can make writers much more productive and much more efficient. Helps with research, it can help sorting through notes. It's a very useful, quick editor. It's not as good as the best human editors, but it is a good, quick editor, right? Like, I've written a Substack post, please identify any parts of this post where I use redundant language, repeat words, or have unclear phrasing, right? We should run all of our posts through that. What I don't use it for is I don't use it for writing, right? And I don't use it for writing for a couple of reasons. One, it's not a good writer. Two, there's some interesting legal implications, right?

• 11:51Speaker 01

  If you were to go onto Substack and say, hey, OpenAI, write a post for me in my style. It's not clear that you own that post or whether the chatbot you own owns that post, right? Eventually, there'll be court cases and be settled. And then, most important, it's like, people expect it to be real and to be you. And I think as time goes on, there's going to be a real premium on authenticity. And no one's going to trust people who use AI to write. So, don't do it for bad, possibly illegal. It breaks the trust bonds. I just went, for example, I went and read the entire audiobook of The Running Ground. It took me like, I don't know, 13 hours or something to go and read it, beginning and end. I could have used an AI voice generator and have it sound pretty much like me.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  But I think it's important to do these things and do it as us. Can I say one more thing about this? The other thing that's really important is this principle called cognitive offloading. And so, that's the principle whereby, once you start to rely on a tool, technological tool, to do something, you get worse at it, right? So, you use a calculator all the time, you forget how to do long division. You use Waze, you forget how to navigate. That's fine, who cares? We don't, better to have a calculator do long division than we do long division. But when it comes to thinking and writing, I don't want to get worse at it. So, I don't want to rely on an AI for it. I find it almost impossible to avoid

• 13:13John R. Miles?

  AI at this point, because no matter what you plug into Google or any search engine, it's using AI on the back end. But I use it in many ways that you just described. It's a great way, as I'm trying to think of a framework or a way to explore a topic before I write it, to test out different ideas and get tonality and how readers will perceive it, how they'll feel, stuff like that. But you're right. It always tends to repeat itself. It always tends to say things that I've heard a million times before. So I find like when I'm writing, I want to be unique. I want to say something that's different and more profound than what's what I've read out there. So it's never going to do that for you.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you're using it the right way. You should definitely use it, right? It's amazing. You just gotta be careful.

• 14:00John R. Miles?

  Let's get back to running. I have to ask, and maybe I'll give you mine. What's the most meaningful mile you've ever run and why that mile?

• 14:09Speaker 01

  The most meaningful mile, it will be when I was

• 14:16Speaker 01

  summer, when I was 17 years old, going into senior year in high school. And there was a mountain called Kinson Mountain in the White Mountains in Vanconie, New Hampshire. And I was a tennis instructor there as my starting job. And I remember trying to run up the mountain and I couldn't. And I kept turning around, right? You like, you'd run up like I was like two miles and there's a right turn. Go to Bald Knob and a left turn to go Kinson. So you run two miles up there. And if you want to sort of chicken out, you go to Bald Knob, you look at the view, you come back, or you can turn left and try to go up Kinson. And I kept, I like during breaks, you know, two hour break between teaching the kids tennis. I'd go run and I'd go and I'd turn left and then I would eventually get too tired and come back.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  And so there was a moment when I actually did it and I got to the top, right? Maybe my third attempt. I was like, oh my God. And I'm using that as a mile. It took 30 minutes. So it's like an extra long mile. Minutes. But it was the first time I'd really summited a mountain. And I think it opened up something spiritually and opened up a connection to the sport. So even more than running a fast mile, even more than setting a record, even more than winning a race. I think it was, maybe that is the origin of my passion for the sport.

• 15:36John R. Miles?

  I love that story. My most meaningful mile also happened about the same age. I was a little bit younger than you at the time. I was a sophomore in high school and we had a really good team that year. I ended up winning the state championship, in fact, but we were in the county meet and we were, there was another team in the county that was also very strong, a bigger school than us. So they competed at a different level. But during that race at about the two mile mark, I was attacked by a rottweiler who took out a big chunk to my leg. And I remember at the time I was running, I was in second place on my team. The person who was the fastest on our team, you might know his name, Keith Dowen.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Really?

• 16:22John R. Miles?

  Yes.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  That's cool.

• 16:24John R. Miles?

  Huge marathon runner.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 16:26John R. Miles?

  He was ahead of me, but one of my teammates, we ended up winning the county championship, but it was really the first time for me that I stared at that much fear. And it was really a defining moment because I realized at that point that I could overcome setbacks.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's a very intense story.

• 16:47John R. Miles?

  Yes.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  My God.

• 16:50John R. Miles?

  Yeah.

• 16:52John R. Miles?

  So your father was really brilliant in pioneering the way you describe him, but do you also say he was turbulent? And there was a period of time when you were around five years old, five or six, where your family was breaking apart. Can you talk about that moment and what it meant to him and what it meant to you?

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so my father, he was brilliant. He grows up in Oklahoma. He then gets a scholarship to Andover, Stanford, wins a Rhodes Scholarship, Oxford, comes back, marries my mother. And he's extremely successful, but, or extremely successful as a very young man, extremely promising. It's John F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy is like, this kid's gonna be president before me. He has like a big photograph of my dad in Life Magazine when he was 20 years old, which is bonkers. But he comes back and he comes back with his Rhodes Scholarship and it's like a little harder to. He doesn't get elected to the senate when he's 29 years old. And he struggles and has a hard time finding himself. By the late 1980s, he's approaching 40. And he's starting, he's like, he becomes a White House fellow, right?

• 18:01Speaker 01

  He's a sort of a young Cold War hawk. He knows he's lined up for a pretty good job in the Reagan administration. But it's at this moment when he also realizes he's gay. And he gets to some, I don't know exactly when he first knew that. I don't know, it's not like it's an all switch, right? It's not like a light, it's like you're gay, you're not gay. Clearly, he's bisexual and he's on a spectrum of sexuality. But he like realizes that he is gay. And he leaves my mother, moves to Washington, begins dating men. And also, it's not a smooth transition, right? It's not like he like goes into like monogamous, long-term relationships with appropriate people.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  He goes into these like utterly chaotic, totally inappropriate relationships with people he picks up in Dupont Circle. And he also blows up his life financially. He can't manage his money, blows up most of his old friendships. It's just an incredibly chaotic period in his life. And obviously, my parents divorce and he's gone. And I don't know all that's going on, I don't even know he's gay, right? I'm six years old. But that was a, it's a real transition for him. And from that moment on, his life was defined not by his professional successes, not by his ambitions, not by the roles he played in government, though he did play interesting roles in government. And he did actually have a, he does, he is the, I believe, the first, first senate-approved,

• 19:28Speaker 01

  openly gay government official. He is a civil rights pioneer in some ways, but he's also just like absolute madness and chaos for the next 30 years of his life. My roommate at the Naval Academy was actually a Rhodes Scholar. And I always thought Dave was going to go into politics. Then turn out the other way, he ended up becoming a Navy SEAL. And now he's an environmental attorney. But I, that's where I always thought he was going to go. Well, you know, Rhodes Scholar is hard, right? You get this stamp on your forehead and it's great because it like gives you access to all kinds of things. But if you don't live up to your promise, it can be really tough.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would think it's the same thing as if you win the MacArthur Genius Award. Yeah, you're forever a genius. And then like your new work is law and people are like, dude.

• 20:13John R. Miles?

  Hang tight. We've got more from Nick Thompson coming up right after the break. Thank you for supporting those who support the show and make it possible.

• 20:29John R. Miles?

  You're listening to Passion Struck, part of the Passion Struck Network. All right, into this inspiring conversation with Nick Thompson. Having interviewed Angela Duckworth a couple of times, I understand why she got it. She's definitely living up to it.

• 20:44John R. Miles?

  Well, your father's diaries, as I understand it, ended up in your possession. Was there something that surprised you the most about what you discovered there?

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. They ended my possession, like he moves away from the United States. He abandons his house, his house like falling down in Virginia, this old farmhouse he owned. He's living in Southeast Asia, complicated reasons. I go to the house, big filing cabinet out front, like a snake in one of the doors. Take the, leave the snake, take the cabinets. And then a few years later, I realized that in the cabinets, there are his diaries. What most surprised me, I went through and I read them all after he passed. What most surprised me was his relationship with his father. And I didn't really know Frank Thompson, my grandfather. I had known that he had played an important role in my dad's life. My dad often said that he could only run a marathon after his father died.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  But the diary entries are like all, they're basically two subjects in my father's diaries. Alcohol, why can't he stop? And then his father and his relationship with his father and like how hard it is, what happened, letters they wrote, and also somewhat ironically, his father's drinking and why can't that guy stop? Which you would have thought would have been a good lesson for teaching my dad to stop drinking. But I was surprised by both the depth of his feelings towards his father, prominence of his feelings towards his father, and then most by the fact that the sins of his father were all sins that he directly repeated and imposed upon me.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Like he psychologically, the things that he most complained about his father doing in the 1970s, with one very important exception, were things that he would then later do in his own final years.

• 22:28John R. Miles?

  So for you, do you think running initially was a way to hold on to him or to get some distance from him?

• 22:34Speaker 01

  For you, both, both, totally both. And initially, it was all a way to hold on to him. It was, it was a sport that he'd introduced me to, it was a sport that we did together. When I would travel and see him, we'd run together at all ages. First, he was of course much faster than me. Eventually, I was faster than him. It was a great sport for father-son bonding. When he died, it was a way to hold on to him and to mourn him, right? Think about him. The fact that it's a sport where you can focus, devote yourself to specific goals, excellence, achievement. That, of course, was something he taught me. But this is a man who like very much lost his discipline, lost his focus. And I believe that running is a way to keep your discipline and keep your focus.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  And so I keep running in part to honor him and remember him, and in part also to not become him.

• 23:23John R. Miles?

  So if you had the opportunity to run one more mile with him today, is that what you would say to him?

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. Yeah, totally. He would love hearing that. And he would like, maybe he'll fight back a little bit, but if he'd been drinking, he'd fight back a lot. But we'd have a good conversation. We always had good conversations and good arguments.

• 23:45John R. Miles?

  So I want to move on to your journey becoming passion struck in your running career. So like many people who run marathons, I think one of the first things that anyone wants to do is to aim for the three-hour barrier.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:00John R. Miles?

  For you, early in your running career, what did that three-hour barrier mean to you? Why was it so important?

• 24:06Speaker 01

  That was the line. That was like, I kind of what you said, like you have either run a three-hour marathon or you have not. Like, it just seemed like that was the cutoff and the only cutoff that mattered. My dad had wanted to break that. He'd run three hours and 41 seconds or something like that. He just missed. And I had watched him run that race when I was seven years old. So it was like deeply implanted in me that 259.59 is good, 300.01 is bad. Right? That was. And so in my twenties, I tried over and over to run a three hour marathon. The first one I did, I was like on pace and then I bombed out and ran 318. And second one, I think I got closer, ran 306. And then I got a flat tire on my way to the third one. Fourth one, I dropped out. Fifth one, I like was on pace and then totally bombed out and ran a 343.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  So I think it was maybe my sixth one or might have been my sixth or my seventh where I ran, finally ran 257.

• 24:57John R. Miles?

  I have to ask for you, when you're doing the marathon, where do you, what mile range do you find is the hardest?

• 25:04Speaker 01

  For me, it was always around the 18th mile mark, 18, 19. Back then, back then, it was like 21 through 24, but I was getting out of train. And I believed this, the insane thing that they teach people coming to the marathons, just run 20, building up. It's all you need to do. Don't run more than 20, the last 6.2, they'll take care of themselves on race day. That's the worst advice, run more than that. If you run 20 in your training, you will die at 20. Why does everybody die at 20? Partly you run out of carbohydrates and partly because all of these race books tell you just to run 20 miles.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Anyway, so I would always die in the later part of the races. Now that I'm much faster, I understand the race better. The hardest part is like staying calm at like miles four through 10 and not, you can tell yourself a million times, right? I'm going to run this pace, this heart rate rate, stay behind this person and I'm not going to go ahead of it. And then you're out there and people are cheering and you feel so good. And it is easy to go a little fast and then kapooch, you're done. And so that to me is like the first, that's you suffer more and you hurt a lot more in miles, 18 through 25. But the trick, right? The moment where you're going to succeed or fail is earlier.

• 26:20John R. Miles?

  It absolutely is. So you then join, if my history is correct, you then join a New York running club.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 26:29John R. Miles?

  Where you end up setting a more audacious goal, a goal for yourself of trying to hit 240.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:36John R. Miles?

  And you weren't successful at doing that for a while.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  I was not.

• 26:40John R. Miles?

  Maybe you can talk about that journey.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny. I tried forever to break three hours and like finally broke it. Then I'm, then I get like way faster. I run 243 and I'm like, okay, I'm going to break 240. And then that takes forever too. That also takes seven years of just repeated failure. Yeah, I kept running. Two forty-three, two forty-three, two forty-two, two forty-two, two forty-five, two forty-five, two forty-six, two forty-three, two forty-two. I just couldn't do it. And I eventually cracked it. Philadelphia Marathon. It was the year, I can't remember what year it was. It was the year of Hurricane Sandy, which I think was the year of the elections. That would have been 2012. And the New York Marathon was canceled. So I ran Philadelphia Marathon and I cracked two forty. And I thought that would be the fastest I'd ever go. I would have been thirty-seven then, pretty psyched. It's very hard. It's almost like when you set a goal and you miss it, it becomes easier to miss it the next time.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  And I just got in a, I couldn't break through physically in those prime years. I couldn't break through and go much faster.

• 27:36John R. Miles?

  I think that's a good stopping point because if you're someone who's listening to this and they're maybe facing that same mental block that they have, whether it's running or some area in their life, what would your advice be to them?

• 27:50Speaker 01

  I think what I didn't do, the reasons were buried pretty deep psychologically and they dealt with the sickness I had. But for someone who hasn't gone through the medical stuff that I went through in that same period,

• 28:02Speaker 01

  the trick is to like, you have to figure out a way to force yourself to go at a speed that you don't think you can go, right? And that's really hard because you have to use your mind to make yourself do a thing that your mind thinks you can't do. And I tell this story about when I was, in the book, I tell the story about when I was fifteen and I was running track and I thought I could only run two miles in eleven minutes and thirty seconds. That's where I ran like eleven thirty, eleven forty. And then I entered this race where I don't know the size of the track. And because of that, I don't know how fast I'm going. And I run, end up running ten forty-eight, which is much better. In my forties where I started, I figured out how to crack this barrier and then some. It was partly by convincing myself that a six-minute mile wasn't fast.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  And to do that, I went out on the track and I would run two hundred meters at four thirty pace, right? Just to get used to seeing fours on my watch. And I'd go and I'd run two-mile repeats at like five thirty pace, just to get used to being much faster than five fifty-nine, right? I had to like, at a deep level, convince my body that running a six-minute mile was not fast, it was slow. And it's a very hard mental process. And whether you're trying to go under a six-minute mile or eight-minute mile or a four forty mile, you've got to figure out a way of...

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Getting past those mental limits. And the same thing applies at work. Like, sometimes you just have to set a goal that seems impossible and push to it. This thing that you think is going to take you five days, right? And you're going to just do it in a day. And you learn different habits. You learn different processes. You learn better ways of not wasting time. This, in a way, happened to me. I remember, this is part of the book too, but it's a pretty relevant story.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Because it's quite similar. It was the day of the Boston marathons. I worked at The New Yorker at that time. Amazing magazine, loved it. And I was the editor of the website. And I edited and I managed. I had lots of confidence. And I was like, you could give me a story. And I was absolutely convinced I could make it better. I could put it on the internet. I could help spread it through our audience. What I did not have confidence is that I could write or that I could write quickly. And Boston Marathon happens, sorry, bombs happened at the Boston Marathon, it's 2013. And David Remick, who runs The New Yorker, one of the greatest journalists of our lifetime, comes into my office, my boss. And he's, Nick, you're going to write about this. I was like, no, David, I've got other things to do. I'm an editor. I can't do this. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  All these excuses, all these reasons why it's not right for me. And all this other guy, he's a runner and a writer. Like, why don't we get, like, Murakami? David is, shut up. And he, like, he says to me, he doesn't say, shut up. He's way too gentle. Nice for that. He, like, listens, but you can tell he's, like, rolling his eyes. And he's like, Nick, this is what's going to happen. You can put that on your phone.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  I'm going to walk out of this door, Ross's office. I'm going to close the door. And in one hour, I'm going to come back. I'm going to open the door. And when I do that, you're going to take a story you've written and you're going to give it to me. And then he walks out, closes the door. An hour later, he comes back and you, I did it, right? And like, basically, it was this forcing mechanism that was like, you have to do it. Stop thinking about your limits and stop thinking that you're a bad writer. Or stop thinking that you're incapable of writing quickly or doing this big thing because you can't. And so sometimes you need a boss or a teammate or a coach to force you into that uncomfortable position. Now, there are, like, limits. If he'd said, I'm going to come back in 12 seconds, like, I couldn't have written the story in 12 seconds, right?

• 31:31Speaker 01

  You need someone who actually knows what you can do. So he was the right coach and the right manager at that moment. Other people have been the right coaches and right managers at different moments who have forced me into uncomfortable situations, which is how you improve.

• 31:47John R. Miles?

  Do you think part of that, and thank you for sharing it, goes back to your father's line, "Never take on mice when you can take on tigers"? Yeah, that's what it made me think of when you were talking about it.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was an email he sent me back when I was a kid.

• 32:02John R. Miles?

  Nick, I want to go back to this period of your life because I have found that anything that's ever been worth accomplishing in my life has taken far more effort and I've encountered far more setbacks than I ever possibly could have imagined. And long before you broke 240, you were faced, you mentioned it, a health crisis that stopped you in your track. You heard the one word that no one ever wants to hear.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:35John R. Miles?

  So you describe that in the book as like the, after getting that diagnosis of thyroid cancer is like the worst year of your life. Can you take us back to that moment and that period? Because it wasn't just running. I mean, there were a ton of things going on in your life.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's everything. So a lot of stuff is going on in my life at that moment. I was 30 years old and I'd just been married, which is important. I had been in a professional rut and was like coming out of it and just gotten a good job. And really, I had been in a professional rut for 10 years. It's like gotten the job that had pulled me out like two months before. And then I'd run this awesome marathon. I'd run a 243 marathon. And so I went to go see the doctor right after the race. I was supposed to see the doctor before the race, but I didn't want to because I was worried he would tell me not to run the race because there's something wrong with my knee, which is not the best way to operate, but it's the way all runners operate. And so I go and see him like a week after the marathon and he puts his hands on my throat, does the staphylenic, sees a little nodule, right?

• 33:37Speaker 01

  And says we have to get that tested out. And I was like, whatever, it's whatever. But then over time, it becomes thyroid cancer and then they have to operate. They actually had to operate on me twice. See, it's a little bright, but you can see I have the scar, like a necklace right there. And

• 33:55Speaker 01

  This made me confront mortality in a way that was quite different. I was thirty years old, I was healthy. I'd never had, I'm sick as a baby, but I'd never been sick in a real way. And I was convinced I was gonna die. I wasn't, doctors and rational people who look at the numbers know that a healthy thirty year old male, it's their thyroid cancer, is almost certainly gonna get through it. But you go through radiation treatment, you've spent all these hours like lying on the floor just feeling the worst. And then you come out, you live in isolation for a little while, you come out, can't walk, you're just too beat down and exhausted. And it had been right after, like it was inextricably tied to my running because it had been right after I had run this awesome marathon, right?

• 34:39Speaker 01

  You spend all these years trying to break two thirty, then you're two forty-three and you're like, I'm on top of the world. And then you're like, no, you're not. And so it was a big shift. And so then I came back. Eventually I got healthy and figured out the dose of lepidoroxin that I was supposed to take to modulate my internal systems, get back on it and get back to running. It was really important to run another marathon once I was healthy. I came back to the New York Marathon two years later. So in two thousand and five, I ran the New York Marathon in two hours, forty-three minutes and fifty-one seconds. In two thousand and seven, after all of that, I run in two hours, forty-three minutes and thirty-eight seconds, which is pretty awesome. Now, what did those thirteen seconds mean for you?

• 35:23Speaker 01

  When I started that race, I wanted to break two forty, just because basically every race I wanted to break two forty. And I ran on pace to try to run two forty, like I wasn't trying to. But when, I remember coming, you turn, you run down like Central Park South, come from the circle, you turn into, you turn back into the park, then you're running up towards Tavern on the Green and you're running to this beautiful place that's like profoundly important in my memory. It's where my track team used to meet, it's where my aunt and uncle used to live, aunts and uncle used to live. This is an awesome part of New York and I'm running up there and I'm like looking at the clock and I'm like, oh my God, I'm like on the exact same time as two years ago. And I just, the emotions when I crossed that finish line were, when I realized that I was faster than I'd been, even though I hadn't run two forty, even though I hadn't run the

• 36:08Speaker 01

  race exactly right and all that. So it was a very profound moment that I'll never, never forget.

• 36:14John R. Miles?

  So I want to go back to your sickness just for a second because I think it's an important point. You write that we don't think about death most days, which means we also forget we're alive. And that line really struck me. For someone who's listening today, what practice helps you remember you're alive on the ordinary Tuesday?

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Partly running. I mean, like running reminds me and part of this running is so tied up with my sickness. I don't think about my sickness often. I do think about it often when I run. And so there are a number of things that just remind me that I'm here for a short period of time and it matters. One, of course, is having children and being with my children, thinking about them and their options in their life. Same sort of questions that you and I were discussing with your kids a few minutes ago. Running is a practice that helps remind me of that. And then just whenever I see beauty in the world, whenever I saw a dance show the other night with my wife, it was just amazing. And I think it triggers a feeling of being alive in a way that when I was in my teens and twenties, I appreciated art and music and life maybe in ways that were deeper, the spiritual highs, the emotional

• 37:18Speaker 01

  highs that you'd reach, the kind of the emotional meaning I could find in music was a young man's mind versus an old man's mind. But I didn't associate it as much with being alive as I do now. And I think that's a function of having been through my sickness.

• 37:33John R. Miles?

  For those who listen to the podcast, you might remember an episode I did in episode 670 with a gentleman named Joel Beasley, host of the Modern CTO Podcast. And the reason I'm bringing this up is Joel talks about the importance of setting ceilings for yourself. And he was telling me when he started Modern CTO, we set this ceiling for him that he ended up breaking seven years later. So he decided that he wanted to become a stand-up comedian. And so now he's setting a ceiling that for him, success means that he's going to sell out Madison Square Garden someday. So that's

• 38:11Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. That's awesome.

• 38:12John R. Miles?

  The ceiling he has set.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:14John R. Miles?

  You were at this ceiling of 240 for a while. And in fact, I heard you say in another podcast that the people in your running club started to call you Mr. 243, which

• 38:26Speaker 01

  I know. That's so annoying. I mean, they were wrong, but like,

• 38:29John R. Miles?

  Well, I love this story. So you got approached by a major brand who is doing an experiment on, can they take people who are amateurs, not professionals, and change their performance trajectory? And man, I would love for you to talk about this because I found this so interesting.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  I know. It's crazy. In retrospect, it's this whole trajectory in my running life changes. I get this email from a comms executive at Nike, a guy named Matt Neller. And he's like, hey, at that point, I'm the editor in chief of Wired, right? So I'm not exactly, it's not like they take my name out of the hat, right? I covered Nike. And but they know that I run, and I had written a story about their new shoes in the New York City Marathon. And he sends an email. It's like, hey, we're starting this program. We pair elite coaches with non-elite runners. You want to be part of it? And I like legit almost didn't write him back. And I didn't write him back for a few days because I was like, oh, man, running is getting old. Do I need to do this? It's a selfish sport.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  If I spend enough time on it, I really want to have to deal with a bunch of like elite coaches trying to coax a little more speed out of this broken down. I was 43 years old. And I like didn't write him back for, I'm very fast on email, but I didn't write him back. And then he wrote on a Monday or Tuesday. And then that weekend, it was my 25th high school reunion. And I go out and it was like, super intense because a lot of my friends on that team died. I had one of them in his early twenties, like died while like on a stage performing, fell off the stage and died. I had two of them who like died from cancer. And the one I was struck by, I just had the worst, all the different cohorts in my life. This is the cross country team of

• 40:11Speaker 01

  Andover when I was there has just had the most misery. My closest teammate, the guy who like beat me at New England, right? The guy I trained with, goes to college, is a top runner at Williams, and then has given a cancer diagnosis and given like a 5% chance of survival. And he makes it and comes to doctor treating people. But just the tragedy that the false scrup. And so I'm like thinking about that. And I'm going for this run where I go and run this route up Holt Hill that I used to do. A friend of mine had just died, this guy Tim, really close to me. And It's been a year since my father died and there's something about the intensity of the emotion. And I remember on that run, I was like, you know, I'm going to try this. I'm going to try it. I'm just going to try to be more intense. I'm going to try to be a little bit like I was as a high schooler. And then I was thinking about my dad. I was like, what would my dad say if I had been

• 40:56Speaker 01

  offered this chance to get much better? So I write back, finally, maybe it's on that Monday, I write back to Matt. I'm like, okay, let's talk, right?

• 41:04Speaker 01

  And so then Matt begins this process. The next step, he organizes a conference call where I get on the phone with the three coaches, one of whom is Joe Holder, who's an expert in motion, mobility. Another is Brett Kirby, who's this like mad scientist, spiritual leader. He like designs a lot of the programs for Elliot Kipchoge. And then there's Steve Finley, who's like a coach, who go and run the Brooklyn Track Club, becomes an epic coach. And I talked to the three of them and they're like, okay, tell us about your running. I'm like, wow, I'm this old guy. I have this intense job. Nickname Mr. 243. I'd love to run, love to. I told him my goal, I told him my goal is to run better than two hours plus my age in minutes. So that meant run faster than 243. And they would

• 41:48Speaker 01

  later tell me, they listened and they're like, what's wrong with this dude? He can go so much faster. And so they have this conversation in the background and they're like, look, given what this guy has done, given his training, given his natural ability, like we can get him faster. And so they put me on a program, they start training me and then everything shifts.

• 42:07John R. Miles?

  So Coach Finley tricked you past a mental cap. For listeners, what's the practical playbook for bursting a ceiling that looks like data but is actually belief?

• 42:18Speaker 01

  That's like the best anybody's ever said it. It's looks like data, but it's actually belief. That's so good, John. That's so good. I love it.

• 42:25John R. Miles?

  I told you I'm a writer.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  That's beautiful. No AI could write that. So he basically decides that he needs to convince me that I can fit myself into a younger man's body and that I can be as strong and fast as I was when I was 18 years old. And so he starts having me run faster. He has me go to the track and run 400 meter repeats, which I haven't done since college. He has me go out there and run like fast miles. And he's starting to just reset the calibration in my mind about what is fast and what is slow. And he wants me to run 238, basically wants me to run six minute miles. Six minute miles, 237, 12. He wants me to run that for us. And so we start to, he doesn't tell me this is what he's doing. He only tells me later. He's trying to convince me that I can do these things that I couldn't do,

• 43:12Speaker 01

  but he's not telling me directly. He's not saying, Nick, you can run a 237. Let's go, bro. No, he's just like setting these schedules that slowly are shifting my perception about what I can do. And he's setting them at exactly the right way so that I'm hitting them and succeeding. And I'm like, feeling like I'm accomplishing them. And he lays out a Google Doc with a schedule. Joe tells me what to eat, tells me the prostrating to do. Brett observes from a distance, but then weighs in on these sort of deep physiological questions about, of course, because I'm a reporter and a journalist, I'm always like, explain what happens to your mitochondria as you get older. Brett's there to talk through everything. And I start seeing him getting faster, right? I start like running these faster mile repeats.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Start hitting these workouts I haven't hit before. I do really well in a race. I'm like, huh. I run the Aspen Marathon, part of a workout. I'm like, wow, I did that pretty quickly. It's up and down mountains, not a fast time, but impressive finish. And then I go out and I run the Chicago Marathon and I run it in 238. And then I come back and I'm like, you know what? I feel good. I'm gonna run the New York Marathon four weeks later. And I run that in 238, too. And I'm like, huh, something's shifting. And then I'm like, you know what, guys? And then the Nike Experimentettes, like Nike Experiment was supposed to run to the end of the Chicago Marathon. I think those guys like Brett, Joe and Steve were probably paid to like train a cohort through the Chicago Marathon. And then I'm like, Steve, can we keep going? And he's like, yeah. And so then he trains me, trains me for more.

• 44:46John R. Miles?

  Well, one thing that I really wanted to ask you about is, so you hit 229.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:52John R. Miles?

  But after you do it. You wanted to get right back at it.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:57John R. Miles?

  And this is how I really got injured in running. My coach at the Naval Academy, Coach Al, like never gave us a break and ended up just pounding us into the ground. And on top of everything else at the Naval Academy that you have to deal with, my body just started collapsing on me and it was terrible. So there's definitely this rest that you need to take that oftentimes you don't want to. What convinced you to stop and what did you learn from taking a pause?

• 45:28Speaker 01

  So I run those two 238s and then I come back in the next spring, I run 234 and then the next fall I run 229 and that's the fall of 2019. And so I run this 229 and I've had this like magical sequence right where I've gone, I've taken 15 minutes off my time in a year and I finished the race, right? And I'm like, all right, 229. And so I don't think I've ever admitted this before, John, so I'm giving you some breaking news here. I didn't even admit this to my wife or my kids. It's so embarrassing. I finished that race and I'm like, I think I can qualify for the Olympic trials, right? Which is 219 a year, right? And, or 218, right? And for those of you who aren't runners, like it may seem like 229 isn't that far from 218, like it's phenomenally different, right?

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Like even at that moment, I could run like two miles or three miles at the pace. Like people don't quite understand, like I'm a very good runner. I could not keep up with the marathon leaders for like more than 400 meters. Like they go so much faster. And so I finished the race and I'm like, Steve. And I think I wanted to run it because the, I can't remember the qualifying window, but I was like, maybe I'll run the C I M marathon in eight weeks. And I was like, Steve, maybe we can make a program to try to run like 219 in eight weeks. And he was like, Nick.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  He didn't say you can't do it. And if I had said, we have to do it, he probably would have done it. But he's, he's like, I've been watching you and I'm looking at you. And I gotta tell you that the night before the marathon, every other race we've run, I've known you're gonna get it. I can't tell you I've known you're gonna get it. I've known you're gonna get it. But I looked at you and I was worried before this one. He's like, you look skinny. You look worn out. Looked like we'd gone to the max. And he's like, you don't need to go to try to run a 219 now. You need to sleep. Um, and so it's interesting, right? Because what he had done in both cases at the beginning, he had reset my expectations. To make me go faster because that was rational. And at the end, he reset my expectations. No, you can't actually do that. You're not going to run 200. You're not thinking, all you're going to do is wreck your Achilles or whatever.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  And so he gets me to dial it back and slow it down. And then a couple of months later, we start going. And then I get in the best shape of my life. So this is in the winter of 2020. And I was assuming I was going to go fast into 29, but then we have COVID. So everything gets reset.

• 47:43John R. Miles?

  Well, one of the phrases that I caught in the book is pain is information, not truth.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:48John R. Miles?

  And I think you got this from running ultra distance races. How did you teach yourself mid race or midlife to tell yourself how to figure out protective signals from genuine red flags?

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Every runner struggles with this, but it's so interesting. As this is partly from talking with Kirby, it's partly through reading a lot of the literature. But as you get deeper into the sport, you realize this phenomenal thing, right? It's a theory that initially began with this guy, Tim Noakes, called the central governor theory. But the theory, which I believe absolutely, is that most of the pain you feel in running is not strictly physiological. It is psychological. And what's happening is that your brain has expectations about what your body can do. And it believes that in the, given the current temperature conditions and your current level of fitness and your heart rate and your body heat and everything else it's measuring. If it worries that you're going to head out of homeostasis and go to an unsafe spot, it sends a pain signal, right? And that is useful because your brain is trying to protect you, right? It's an evolutionary signal.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  If you are, it knows you're going to go run 100 miles across the savannah. It has a sense of how hard it is to run 100 miles across the savannah. And if it's too hot, it's going to send a pain signal. And where that pain signal appears, it's not quite random, but it's not related to where the most exertion is. Right? You might feel it in your elbow, right? Right? And your elbow does nothing when you run. You might feel it in your digestive system, right? You might feel, you might feel it in your calf, right? So you get all this pain that is information, but it's not real. On the other hand,

• 49:21Speaker 01

  You might actually have torn your Achilles, right? And so your Achilles might hurt, not because your brain is sending a signal that you're about to lose homeostasis, you might have literally torn it, right? You might have broken your femur. And learning when you run, like what is real and what is not? I just went through this on Saturday where I went out and it was like my hamstring was hurting. I injured my hamstring playing soccer with my kids like a while ago. And it's hurting when I was running, started, I was like, all right, it's gonna clear up. I'm good. And then like eight or nine miles in, I'm like, this is just fine, worried, I'm good. And then 10 miles in, I'm like, oh my God, I can't move, I have to walk home. So probably would have been useful for me to have recognized this at mile six.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  They're, and so they're just all pretty good at it. I'm not perfect and recognizing like what is real pain and what is not is what prevents you from getting injured. It's what allows you to go faster. It's a very complicated process and it's like a huge part of becoming a successful runner.

• 50:18John R. Miles?

  Yeah, man, I remember especially in critical races, I, my mind would always have that crossfire debate.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:26John R. Miles?

  When I am trying to push myself to someplace that I've never gone before. And sometimes I lost the debate and sometimes I won the bait.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, every runner knows this debate, like part of your brain is like, stop. Part of your brain is no, I'm still going and you have it and you keep going.

• 50:46John R. Miles?

  So what, because I think this is applicable to life too, because we do the same debate in any goal we're trying to chase. What have you learned to get yourself through that debate and come out on the other side of it positively?

• 50:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, sometimes you just can't do it, right? So we'll say that, but I'm gonna go tell you the story about a race I just ran. So the last, I guess maybe two races ago was the Lake Warhamog 50 miler. And I was trying to set the American record in the 50 mile run for men over 45, which means running 635 pace for 50 miles. And I did it and I was right on pace with a little head of pace, sort of like mile 35 and I felt great, right? And I'm hydrating well, meeting well, it's a good day.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  And then at thirty five, start to feel it, right? And the first thing you do is you try to push it aside. It's okay, right? Like steady, you're doing it, right? You just concentrate. It's like a form of meditation. You're trying to like, you know what? I'm just gonna stay in my mind. I'm gonna concentrate. I'm gonna relax. I'm gonna push this pain aside. I'm gonna think about different things, right? All I'm gonna do is I'm not gonna worry that I have fifteen miles to run. I'm gonna reset my expectations. My brain is sending these signals because it's worried I can't run fifteen more miles. I'm gonna try to convince myself that this is just a race about getting to the next mile or the next aid station or that telephone pole, right? As you've reset what you think you're trying to do, right? Or you've reset it. There was another person, there's a guy I have lapped, but he was like, good. He was like highlighting people. And I was like, dude, you need to do me a favor. I'm trying to set the American record.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  You look like you're fine, even though I just lapped you. Will you run with me at six thirty pace? And he's like, yeah, dude, let's do it. Right? And so I like run behind this guy at six thirty pace, right? And so I'm like holding on to him. And then he gases out at about mile forty two. And I'm going back to like high fiving and the stuff he says. And so I'm still on pace at mile forty two, right? And I've held on.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  And so then I'm like, oh, boy, right? And so then I'm like, okay, now I'm gonna focus on my mantras, right? So I have these like things I think about when I'm running to try to push the pain aside. And the main one I do is I like think about one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. And so I'm like putting the emphasis, it's like a drummer, putting the emphasis on my right foot, then my left foot, then my right foot, then my left foot. And I'm like, trying to keep myself balanced and like straight and steady, but also just trying to calm the mind and shut everything out. And so I'm like doing that. I'm like trying to think about other moments where I've succeeded. I'm trying to think about other things I've done that are hard. And I'm doing what I can, but to no avail. I like started to slow. I was in agony. I pushed so hard.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  And I actually crossed fifty point zero miles ahead of the second American record. I started for one age group and not both age groups, but the loop course, you can't run perfect tangents. So I ended up finishing and missing both records. I tried, I wasn't, I was not able to overcome whatever signal were going on in my body. But man, did I try.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  Man, I love that story.

• 53:43John R. Miles?

  So I understand that another race, you finally win the race you vowed to win as a kid.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:48John R. Miles?

  And then later you pace your son through his own breakthrough. What did those two finish lines teach you about things like pride, pressure, and letting your own kids tell their own story?

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Oh, I love that so much. So yeah, there's this race I spent when I was a kid. I spent all this time in this place called Northeast Tarboro up near Acadia National Park in Maine.

• 54:07John R. Miles?

  Yeah, I was just there.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 54:09John R. Miles?

  Yeah.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  Right, right. It's like the best place in the world to run, like these carriage trails. It's gorgeous. Yeah, honestly, like if I were to, if I didn't have a job and if I were just a runner, I would move there. So there's always a race. Sadly, it's been canceled. If anybody listening wants to restart it, that would be God's work. But when I was a kid, there's always this five mile race that would end in town. And I remember watching it as a kid. My dad ran it one year and I remember just vowing I would win it.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  And like making this pledge while I walked around my backyard as a child. And then I tried to and I couldn't. And then I like ran it when I was undergraduate. I was strong and good. I came third, fifth. I ran it like a bunch of times and I never won. Then in the summer of 2019, summer where I'd end up running, where I'd run 229, I pledged that I would win and I did. Right. And I win and my kids are there at the finish line cheering and everybody's exciting. And you know, who, who cares? It's like a local road race, but you have to be fast to win. Like there are good people who run that race. And so two years later, it's canceled the next year. 2021, I come back and my son, my middle son, who's then 11, is like, you know what, Dad? I'm going to run it. Awesome.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  And we trained together and I try not to put pressure on him, right? They may dispute this, but I do my very best to. My, my goal as a parent is to be available for them anytime they want to do something. If they want to push themselves, they want to get good at something, I will help them, right? They want to get good at chess, I will play chess with them every night. But I'm not going to tell them to play chess, right? If they want to get good at soccer, I will train with them every night, but I'm not going to tell them to go practice, right? And so he wants to get better at running. And so I go out and I take him to the track and he gets better. And then we go out and we, he runs the race. So I run, I finish, I think I come in third that year. And then I circle back and there he is, like a mile to go. He's trucking, doing a running nine-minute mile pace as an 11-year-old. And I get with him and I like tell him, listen to

• 56:05Speaker 01

  his breathing and I run a little bit with him. I like tell him to, actually, I think I have to tie his shoes at one point. His shoe gets untied. But I try to help him focus and like, he speeds up, accelerates, and then he like guns it to the line and his cousins are there cheering. And it was an amazing experience for him and a great experience for me to see him do something to sport and love it. And like he and I now, he's now 15. On my 50th birthday, we went out and ran, I wanted to run a sub-five-minute mile for my 50th birthday. So he went out and paced me for the first 1,200 meters of it. We'd go to the track and we'd do eight by 400 where I'll lead one, he'll lead one, I'll lead one, he'll lead one. It's awesome. Yeah, so cool.

• 56:44John R. Miles?

  Well, I want to end talking about Michael Westfall. You're right that Michael says, there's more to running than just beating people. He then goes on to say, I realized that when I was 58. What did Michael change in your understanding of things like excellence, dignity and community and what they mean?

• 57:02Speaker 01

  And Michael Westfall is a hero. So this race, the Northeast Harbor Road Race, when I'm running with my son and we're finishing, I was with this guy, my training partner out there is this cop, guy named Judson, killer runner, right? That year where I came in third, he came in second. And I see this guy, I think at that point in the race, he was just ahead of Zachary. And I was like, Judson's okay, right? He's like running, his arms flailing all over and like circling up, right? And Judson's like, ask Michael Westfall, man, he's a legend. And I was like, well, okay. And then I run with Zachary, Zachary ends up finishing just ahead of this guy. And so I'm like, Michael Westfall, who's Michael Westfall? And I look up and he had actually won the Northeast Harbor Road Race the year my dad had run. And so I say to Judson, I was like, where's this guy

• 57:44Speaker 01

  live? What is his story? And so I write to him and I'm like, hey, my name's Nick, I love running, you finished just ahead of my son, I'd love to come talk to you. And so he has this incredible story. He grows up on this island, Cranberry Island. And it's this little island off the coast of Maine. So there's Mount Desert Island, which is off the mainland, that's where Acadia is, that's where I was. And then off of Mount Desert Island is Cranberry Island. And it's got a year-round population of about 50. And there's one road, this two-mile road, runs through the middle of the island. And then there's like little off roads and beaches. And

• 58:19Speaker 01

  Grows up there and like when you grow up a little island, like not enough kids to go to high school, his mom has to get powdered milk, his dad like works in Boston, Monday through Thursday, comes up Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Mom is like raising the kids and the little house, they didn't have electricity. They're in a tiny island off the coast of Maine and there's not a lot to do. And so everybody runs and there's like a population, whatever, 40 or 50 and seven of them become sub three hour marathoners, which is crazy. And so Michael becomes this awesome runner and he runs 229, 228. He's this great runner, wins all these races in Maine. He's also a carpenter, strong man, like he's, he builds a lot of the houses. There are all these sort of affluent families who come for the summer and the people who

• 59:04Speaker 01

  live year round and he builds the houses for everybody, builds his tennis courts, he's flowing like rock gardens. Great Island's awesome. And he builds a lot of it and he's the caretaker for all the homes. And then when he's like 49 years old, he gets this sort of shake in his shoulder and he's like, what is this? I'm sore. And then eventually he realizes he's got Parkinson's, right? And so then his arm starts to flail and he gets the symptoms of Parkinson's. We've all seen Michael J. Fox, we've all seen the consequences. And at first he's embarrassed, right? He's this strong guy who builds the island. These are his customers. Tries to hide it. And then he's like, I'm not going to hide it and I'm going to run. And so he learns to run with it, right? And he like ties his hand

• 59:43Speaker 01

  back with string and he learns how to like handle, I mean, with Parkinson's and he's phenomenal. I think he runs like a 316 marathon with Parkinson's, right? In his 50s, right? He comes in like the top of his age group, competing with people who don't have Parkinson's. Like it is amazing. And so when I go and see him, he's in his 60s and I get on to, get off the boat, I'm gonna go up and there he is. And he's like, his arms are flailing all over the place. I brought my eldest son and we go and we drive with him. We get in the car and I'm like, God, right? This can't be safe. I brought my child. And I'm like, you know what? This guy knows this island. I'm gonna just trust him. And so we talk

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  about his life. We talk about what he learned. We talk about his embarrassment initially and then his pride and learning how to handle it. And that quote. He was him describing what he got from running. And when he was young, he just wanted to beat everybody, like everybody, right? He wants to run and win. And he ran 230, he wants to run 229, he wants to run 229, he wants to run 228, right? And then, once you get Parkinson's, and once, it's a little bit like my experience with cancer, but you multiply it by 100, he starts to really fall in love with the community that comes from it and the people he meets and like other people who are struggling with different forms of Parkinson's, different kinds of medical treatments, different kinds of reactions. And he travels around, talking to people, running, racing. He learns that he has to run with support because he might fall, he might need, it's very hard to get a water cup, right?

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  There are a lot of things that are hard when you're controlling your body. And he just becomes this amazing runner. He sets the world record, I believe, for fastest marathon by someone with Parkinson's, and he keeps going and going. And then, eventually, he can't go any further. He can't do it anymore, right? He becomes too sick. He goes through a treatment that gets him more control, but he can't really run, except we went out to see him this summer, so five years after I first saw him, or four years after I first saw him. And I bring my youngest son this time. And my youngest son is also a great runner. He's now a runner. We go out there and we talk for a while. I'm just catching up, like, the book is already done. I've written about him. And I'm just seeing him because I like him and admire him. And then, he says, well, let's go for a run.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  And we go out and the three of us go and run a mile on that road on Cranberry Island. And he's one of those people who I just, I feel blessed.

• 1:02:04John R. Miles?

  Well, I just have to ask you one and one last thing, and you can answer it quickly. But given his story, tomorrow morning, a listener who's heard this wants to start, maybe not running, but their own version of it. What's the smallest, most durable step you recommend? And what would you say they should stop doing that's been capping their own ceiling?

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  They just should go out the moment they want to go out. That's the beautiful thing about running is you get to decide and you get to control. You won't play tennis, you need someone else, you need a racket, you need a ball. You want to run, and you also need to reserve a pork. You want to run, you can just go, you turn the knob, right? And so whatever's limiting them, whether they don't want to run because it's hot, they don't want to run because they don't have the right shoes, or they don't want to run because their knee hurts, or whatever, they're worried about something like, let's go out, run around the block, run five minutes, run 10 minutes, or walk five minutes, 10 minutes. Try to identify the thing that's holding you back and making you not want to do it. And one of the reasons I think this, one of the reasons I wrote the book is because there's

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  this realization that like, you really can just do, you really can just run, just you. Like, it's all on you. There's nothing else, there's no one out there is stopping you from running, you don't need to rely on anybody else. Like, you can run anywhere, right? If you, like, I've done long runs, I've run 10 miles around a parking lot, right? You can go and run wherever you are. If I run, I have run when it's 110, I have run when it's negative 10, right? You can go out there and you just make, something Michael Westphal said, I was like, how many days, I was like, how many days did you not run because of the weather? Right, some island, right in the middle of Maine. It's like, how many days did you like not run because it was icy, or the snow piled up in front of the front door, you couldn't get out?

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  Or it's stormy, or a tree had come down, and he's like, never, it's just a choice. And so that's one of the beautiful things about running, so just take advantage of that. It's one of the things that makes this sport so special. So whether it's running, whether it's walking, going out on your bike, whatever it is, just go try to do something that's like a little further, a little faster, a little more intense than you've done before.

• 1:04:15John R. Miles?

  Awesome. Well, Nick, such an honor to have you today. What's the best place that people can go to learn more about you and your work?

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  So I'm on nickthompson.com, I'm CEO of The Atlantic, theatlantic.com, I'm all over social media, usually at @annexthompson, you can see all my runs on Strava. I post a video every day about AI and tech on LinkedIn, so I'm all over the internet.

• 1:04:37John R. Miles?

  Thank you so much for joining us and grant some book.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, John. I'm so glad that you like it. I'm so glad you read it. It was a real pleasure to talk with you and it's a real pleasure to meet your audience.

• 1:04:46John R. Miles?

  That's a wrap on today's conversation with Nick Thompson. What I love most about this episode is how much it reminds us that endurance isn't just physical, it's emotional and spiritual. Running for Nick was never just about miles, it was about meaning. Here are three reflections to carry forward as you get through the rest of your week and your weekend. First, pain is information, not truth. Sometimes what feels like a limit is really an invitation. Second, growth happens in the space between resistance and renewal. And lastly, the most powerful finish lines aren't the ones we cross, they're the ones we create within ourselves. If this episode helped you rethink your relationship with effort, struggle, or discipline, consider paying the

• 1:05:28John R. Miles?

  fee by sharing it with someone who needs encouragement and leaving a five-star rating or review. You can find the companion workbook and takeaways for today's episode at theignitedlife.net, where I share reflections and science-backed strategies for living a life that matters. And don't forget to check out our YouTube channel at John R. Miles or our clip channel at Passion Struck Clips. Next week, we're starting a new series for the month of November on the inner irreplaceables, resilience and emotional mastery. We'll be joined by Dr. Zach Seedler, Global Director of Men's Health Research at Movember, and together we'll explore the evolving crisis of men, identity and mattering, and how redefining masculinity could be the key to our collective healing.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  I think with anyone, if you're going to get up each and every day and do something that really matters to you, that you have a sense of purpose and meaning around, it has to resonate on a personal level. It has to light your fire one way or another. And really, there are many different interweaving narratives that led me to where I am today. The more I reflect on it through conversations like this, I pick up different threads along the way that really turned me into the man that I am and led me down the path to doing the work that I do.

• 1:06:45John R. Miles?

  Until then, stay resilient, stay curious, and as always, live life passion struck.