This is episode 430 with world-ranked ultra runner, the 40 to 44 age group, 50K American record holder, author, and the CEO of The Atlantic, Nick Thompson.
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I'm a former cross country and track athlete for Connecticut College.
I've been coaching runners since 2010, and I'm a former columnist for Trail Runner Magazine.
You can learn more about me and strength running at strengthrunning.com.
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My guest today has been running and racing for 35 years and was previously the world's top-ranked runner in his age group in the 50-mile.
Nick Thompson is now the CEO of The Atlantic magazine, and his new book is now available, titled The Running Ground A Father, A Son and the Simplest of Sports.
In this conversation we talk about how Nick's relationship with his father helped him get into running, what drives him to compete today versus 30 years ago, his recommendations for passing along a love for running to your kids, how his cancer diagnosis changed his relationship with running and the training changes he made to finally have a breakthrough as a master's runner.
Without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Nick Thompson.
Hey, Nick, thanks for making the time and welcome to the podcast.
Jason, it's a total pleasure to be here.
Thanks for inviting me on.
Well, I was a little blown away when you said that you listened to the show.
I'm a runner.
Of course I've listened to the show.
Well, to have someone like you listen to the show is a real honor.
So thank you very much.
No, it's awesome.
You teach a lot of things to a lot of people, including me.
Let me turn the tables on you now.
You have written a hell of a book.
Thank you.
I want to talk about how you've stayed motivated over the years.
I wanna talk about your dad.
I'd love to hear more about your training.
You are just this rare athlete who reached a very high peak in your mid 40s.
And as someone who's just about to be in their mid 40s myself, I'd love to know a little bit more about your thoughts on masters training too.
But uh, maybe we can just start with your dad.
You know he seems like uh, both such a good influence uh, but maybe also somewhat of a cautionary tale uh, Can you talk about your relationship with him and how he might have helped you get into running, fall in love with running, kind of that example that he set?
Yeah, my dad sent a fascinating example with running.
So my dad...
Go back a little bit in time.
His father, my paternal grandfather, is a very strong athlete.
He's a Golden Globes boxing champion.
He runs the 800.
He lives out in the Arizona desert.
You know, real rough and humble, like carrying a gun when he's nine years old kind of guy.
And he gives birth to my father.
They're living in Oklahoma.
My dad is not like that at all.
My dad wants to listen to Mozart.
He wants to kind of read a lot of books.
He's very academic.
He has this tense relationship with his father where my grandfather's like, let's go play baseball.
My dad is like, how about I play the piano?
And it's an extremely hard dynamic.
My father then busts out.
He's like, I'm not going to be here in Oklahoma.
I'm not going to live in Bay Cone.
And then starts to like work his way up the American meritocracy, right?
Gets himself a scholarship to Andover, where he's an outsider, but then fits in, gets himself a scholarship to Stanford, wins himself a Rhodes Scholarship.
Marries into my mother's family, my mother's prominent political family.
And like, he's rocking and rolling, right?
I arrive in that journey.
He's like trying to figure out his life.
Back to the running.
He starts running in the 70s when he's not reaching his political ambitions.
He's maybe drinking too much.
He's worried he's getting overweight.
He's a little frustrated with the world.
It's the 70s running boom.
Then in the early 1980s, he starts to run really seriously.
And he starts doing marathons.
And I'm five years old in 1980, six years old in 81.
And I start to run with him.
And it was weird for me now that I've had kids, but I remember running three miles.
And it must have been when I was five or six because he left when I was six.
But that's a lot for a six-year-old.
And it's what I remember.
It definitely ran a mile, 100% guaranteed.
So I run with him, and then I watch him run the 1982 New York Marathon.
He runs just over three hours.
It's awesome.
I'm so proud.
I read a little essay for the school paper about him.
You know, his life then, you know, it's not long afterwards where his life really starts to unravel.
And he's still an amazing person.
He's charismatic.
He's brilliant.
He's fun.
But he starts drinking way too much.
He comes out of the closet and then like it's just like the world's most sexually promiscuous person.
Just like hundreds of people, you know.
He kind of sort of like loses control of his ability to like pay his bills, do anything on time.
He's in hundreds of lawsuits, leaves the country in part because these lawsuits, the bills, the IRS.
And he spends the last 20 years of his life kind of like running something like a brothel for men in Bali.
So complicated guy climbs the ladder of the American meritocracy and then kind of like tries to burn it all, all the rungs down.
You know, running is a core part of our relationship all the way through.
We run together until he's in his mid-50s, maybe.
We'll go run with the dogs.
We talk about running.
He loves my running, particularly when I break a three-hour marathon for the first time.
He's enormously supportive.
And there's this other interesting connection where he would often say that he was only able to run well once his father had died.
And it was kind of interesting that like when my father died, I also became a much better runner.
You know something about.
Both men served as like an inspiration for running after they were gone, maybe.
So we've been deeply connected through the sport.
And you mentioned kind of like because you have kids now thinking back to when you went and ran at least a mile, but maybe three, with your dad when you were five or six.
I have had a similar experience with, I think my three-year-old daughter wanted to go for a run after dinner one night.
And I said, yes, and I'm in flip-flops.
And we ended up jogging for probably a mile total, a little stop and start.
That's great.
That's great.
It was incredible.
I'm curious if you've passed along your love of running to your kids and how, how you might have done that, because it's kind of tricky right.
Because I think about this now all the time.
Your kids are older than mine.
My kids are a little younger.
It's something I'd love to do, without making them love the sport, without being overbearing, while still allowing them to explore their interests.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on that whole dynamic.
So my general philosophy of parenting and I try to hold up to this, and whether I do or I don't my kids can evaluate in 20 years is be there to support and engage in whatever they want and push them into nothing right.
Never make them run, but if they ever ask if they can run, always be available, right?
And it's a hard balance to completely make, and maybe sometimes I encourage them and push them to do something that they don't want to do, but my goal is to really try to support their passions.
And then also try to set an example.
They are watching very carefully.
They're watching lots of things.
They're watching their classmates, their teachers, whatever.
So how to get your kids into running.
I'll tell you a story.
During quarantine, you know, I decide well, there are no marathons, I'm gonna go run my own marathon.
And so I go and run 26.2 miles in Prospect Park.
And I go and I run it around this little silly two mile loop 13 times.
I come back and I've like totally gassed myself.
Like not 99% effort, but like 100% effort.
And I walk back to the house, which I fortunately can do.
And then I just collapse.
And then I'm like, It's like November, it's a little bit cold.
And I'm watching a movie with my oldest son and I'm like under a blanket convulsing, right?
But the house is like 75 degrees.
I have a space heater and I've got a blanket and I'm like unable to watch the movie.
My like cheeks are sallow.
I just look like death.
And my older son is like, whoa.
He says to me, he's like, I am never going to be a runner.
Then the next day, I go for a walk in Prospect Park.
Remember, it's quarantine.
So we're doing our meetings by walking and meeting with someone about my new job.
And I see my then seven-year-old, six-year-old running.
And he's running like a little, like a mile loop.
And he's like, he basically had been clearly been inspired.
So the same act, the exact same thing had like convinced one child never to do this and the other to do it.
So three kids, two of them are, You know, they're avid soccer players.
They're both now, you know, fabulous runners.
One of them, you know, joined the track team last spring.
It's great.
You know, like the little guy You know, I go and I run with his track, his soccer team on Mondays.
And they're like, he's running a sub six minute mile at 11.
The guy's incredible.
You know they're like.
They're both phenomenal runners and they both seem to be getting something from it.
The two younger ones and the older one, we go on a lot of long hikes, but running's not his thing.
So, who knows, right?
You just do your best.
You teach them your love of the sport.
They observe you very carefully and either they do it or they don't.
I think it's that observation which might be the most important part of things is if they see it, you know if they're around it.
You know, my kids like to model some of my dynamic warm-up exercises before...
I start my run.
Yeah.
Their lunch form needs a little bit of work, but they're getting there.
Mine.
Did your dad encourage you to run or was it very similar?
He just kind of set the example and you wanted to be a little bit more like him in that regard?
My dad was, I think, a little bit different, where he kind of like demanded excellence in everything.
But we're just sort of like assumed.
And like it puts an interesting pressure where he weirdly thought he just had these.
Like he had this sense that I was the most talented person in the world and like anything I did I would do better than everybody else.
And it wasn't like the way your parents like make it up.
He like seemed to genuinely think it was ridiculous.
But that was in a way very affirming.
It's very friendly.
It's very nice.
It's nice to have your parents believe in you, but also it puts a little bit of pressure on you.
And so, You know, if I got all As and an A-, his U wasn't great work.
It was like, well, obviously you should get all As.
Like, what's going on, right?
Or like, you should work a little bit harder.
So there was some pressure.
On the running.
You know, he brought me into it and he was proud that I ran, but then he left right.
So I've only seen him a couple of weeks a year.
And so we didn't really run that much.
We ran a little bit until high school.
And then I started running in high school, Not because of him, but because I got cut from the basketball team.
Oh man, that is so similar to my story.
I started running and never made the varsity team.
So I had to embrace indoor track.
That's mostly.
That's like.
That's how a lot of, like a lot of people come to running, because you know either A they're in seventh grade and you know the gym teacher is like okay everybody, go run around the gym.
And like, they go run a five minute mile, right?
Like that's like Mebka Flemsky, right?
Lots of people like that.
And then there are people like us who can't quite cut it at the cooler sports.
And then we go into running and realize, oh, this is made for us.
And...
There we are.
And all those suckers playing basketball don't realize that in your 30s it's a lot easier to be a runner than a basketball player?
Yeah, basketball is actually the sport with the highest rate of injury among master's men.
So my original love is quite dangerous for me.
Wow, I guess I'm not surprised.
Knees, ankles, all that.
Yeah.
Very explosive.
A lot of direction changes.
Not great for the 40-plus-year-old body.
I don't know, 35, 36 years, quite likely at this point.
And you've kept it up at a really- It's weird when you say it that way.
Sorry, I don't mean to age you, but I do find it very impressive.
And I think it's hard to do because you're racing at a high level.
I want to know what keeps you psychologically engaged with the sport.
Because you know as much as you know even someone like me.
I love running more than most other things.
However, I'm not training at a really high level right now.
I just can't really find, you know, the time.
But I also kind of feel like that's a cop out.
I admittedly just don't have the drive like I used to, despite loving the sport more than I ever have.
So what is keeping you motivated? engaged, motivated, really involved with the sport over time?
And I'm also curious how that motivation has evolved over time.
I don't know the answer to that.
My desire to run fast marathons has not dissipated, right?
And I've been running reasonably fast marathons, you know, since you know 30 years old.
Basically every single year I've been either New York marathon, Boston marathon, Chicago marathon and, like always, at a pretty pretty high level.
And it's never, I've never, I've never not wanted to do it.
Um And every time I go into a race, even if it's like a four-miler in Prospect Park, I get to the starting line, I have the same adrenaline push.
I love putting on my bib.
I love going as hard as I can.
I've never lost that.
Now, part of the reason I didn't lose it is that I never...
I didn't decline, right?
And you can easily lose your motivation once you start to decline, right?
It's not fun to like run a 240, then 245, then 250, then 255.
It's much more fun to go the other way.
And then because I got better in my 40s, that helped, right?
It like offset the normal age-rated decline too.
Like now that I have, started this decline.
You made a little...
Maybe pretend that it's not true, but like, it's pretty obviously true.
And if you look at my Strava, like, geez, Louise, right?
Those trend lines on the same workouts, getting a lot worse.
I've also found new challenges in new races, right?
And I go and do different things.
But that doesn't answer the underlying question, which is a hard one, which is like I could pretty easily at any point in the last 10 years just say you know, I've had a good run.
And I don't know.
There's something hardwired that just loves the loves, the competition and the drive.
And I guess here's the more sophisticated answer.
There's something hardwired that loves the competition and the drive.
And I also genuinely believe that the process of racing and the process to trying to get a top level experience and to wring the most that you can out of your body encourages really healthy habits that help in the things that matter more in life and, like that, help you in being a good parent, that help you in like being a good employee, that help you like trying to live a full and productive life.
And so I have a sense that continuing to focus, continue to daily you know, run hard twice a week, run threshold tempo workouts that that is part of the kind of life I want to pursue.
So that's the other part of the answer.
Yeah, I think that's the more evolved answer and something that I think I didn't realize until I had maybe stopped training so seriously.
Because I had this wonderful benefit of hindsight and looking back over, you know, especially over my 20s.
You know I didn't have the structure of college running yet.
I was still training very seriously, very competitively.
And it also allowed me just to like you said, be productive in almost every other area of my life.
You know, I sometimes was like, how am I getting all these things done?
This is kind of crazy.
It's weird, right?
Like, cause you think, okay, the running takes all this time, right?
You go and you run, you run an hour a day, but you also have to shower and stretch, right?
So it takes a little more time and makes you plan your meals differently.
Why is it that when you're doing that, things work better than when you're not, right?
It's a big question.
I have lots of answers to it, but I think you found the same thing.
Yeah, yeah.
And I can't help but notice.
You mentioned the Boston Marathon, the New York City Marathon, the Chicago Marathon.
It sounds like you've run most of the major races.
I got to ask, which one's your favorite?
New York.
I mean...
I live in New York, right?
My kids come and watch me.
I go to the Boston Marathon and like my sister's there, which is awesome.
My niece and nephew are there.
I run the New York Marathon, and everybody's here.
Everybody I know, and they're cheering, and the people I run with are there.
It goes through all five boroughs.
I mean, look, the Boston Marathon's great.
It goes by my old house.
It's not right by, but quite near.
It directly almost passes my old church.
It's great. but New York.
Now you're asking like the most beautiful marathon I've ever run, right?
Like then that's the Aspen back country marathon, right?
I mean, like I love lots of different marathons, but you know, I don't know.
I've run the New York marathon 12 times, 13 times.
Like I love that race.
New York City was my first marathon in 2008.
I wasn't sure, did you run that race?
I know you ran it in 2007.
No, I ran it in five, seven, and nine.
I didn't run it in eight.
Okay, you like the odd years.
Must've just missed you.
My son was born in...
In June of 2008.
And it was like the one time in my life where it was both work and family.
And so I was writing another book about the Cold War.
And I promised my wife I'd have it done by the time the baby was born.
And so I was like just hauling on the book.
And I didn't really train.
Well, that's understandable.
I had had so much race experience before the marathon and so many different types of races.
But to have your first experience of the marathon, be New York City, going over the Verrazano Bridge, the skyline of Manhattan.
I mean, like, it's so iconic.
It's so, you know, American.
I loved that experience, even though I didn't love being yelled at for, you know, almost three hours.
It's so intense, but it's awesome.
There's some things that are bad about it, right?
Like A when you see that skyline right and you go across the Verrazano and you're like holy shit, that's far away right.
Like, how am I going to get there?
And then you're like...
Wait, that's not even the finish.
You go south for three miles.
So you're three miles north of that?
What?
So that's scary.
The bridges are really bad for your legs.
Up and down the bridges wipes you out.
The quietest part of the race is the hardest, right?
Like miles like 21 to 22 and a half, like are very quiet.
Like that's kind of dark.
I like the people yelling at me the whole time, but I can see how some people don't like that.
And the start is terrible, right?
You get up at like 4 in the morning and take the subway to the ferry, and then you have to like take a bus and go through security and then you have to go find your quarrel.
And, like, my God, what a nightmare.
Like those marathons where you just drive up and you park and you get out of your car and you run.
Those are beautiful.
But yeah, it's all made up for by the fact that it's the greatest city in the world and everybody's there.
Yeah, for sure.
You willingly and almost gleefully endure some of the logistical challenges so that you can experience all that is the New York City marathon.
Totally, totally.
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One thing I want to ask you about, which I think very few people have experience with, is your cancer diagnosis.
And this was something that I believe it was about 20 years ago.
Yeah. but you came back from it.
I did.
You are obviously healthy today.
How did that change your relationship to running?
Because I know you wrote about.
You know the obvious fear of death that comes with that kind of a diagnosis and you know your priorities shift.
And I'm sure all of a sudden running was shoved very violently down the list of priorities.
Well, no, it wasn't in an interesting way.
I mean, it was shoved very violently down the list of capabilities.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
But my diagnosis was like inextricably tied into my running in a weird way where it's 2005, right?
This is my first fast marathon.
And I'm supposed to go see a doctor and I've scheduled my GP and whatever.
It's like supposed to be like three or four days before the marathon, maybe a week before the marathon, but my knee hurts.
And what does a runner do when they have a doctor's appointment a week before the marathon and their knee hurts?
Don't see the doctor because you know the doctor will tell you not to run the marathon, right?
So delay the appointment.
So I delay the appointment and I go see the doctor maybe two weeks after the marathon.
I go see him.
He finds a lump in my throat.
This is nervous.
And then I go through this, like you know, as anybody who's been through a cancer diagnosis they don't know immediately or has had a loved one.
Like you don't know for sure.
You just know something's wrong. but it might be this, it might be that.
Okay, well, it doesn't seem great, but it might still be this, might be that.
Okay, it's bad, but it might be this version of bad and that version of bad, right?
And you just, like, you go down this kind of cascading set of, like, this pathing.
And...
All that is really inextricably tied in because I've just run my first fast marathon.
I had been trying to break three hours.
I run this 243.
I feel on top of the world.
I'm so connected with my body.
So excited about my resting heart rate, whatever.
And then I go in and I have two surgeries.
You can see the scar here.
And still have it.
Go through radiation treatment.
And I'm completely wiped out.
And so by...
April of 2006, I can't walk around the block where I live in Brooklyn.
And so I've got this thing that's like inextricably tied in with my strength and my running.
Now I have this new vulnerability, this new fear of death.
And like running was a huge priority actually.
And so I wanted to run again to prove I was still alive and that like the cancer hadn't defeated me.
And so running was a very big part of my recovery.
Yeah, I can imagine how it, at a moment when you are feeling your strongest, to then feel that vulnerable as someone who was in their 20s, at a time when you know you feel invincible.
I remember being in my 20s.
It was incredible.
What a feeling.
And it was also an interesting time because.
I had been pretty frustrated professionally throughout my twenties.
Like I didn't, I couldn't get my career to work.
I had been a great college student and had all these aspirations.
And kid tapped is like promising kid.
But I couldn't crack it.
And I was trying to work as a journalist.
And then I had finally gotten a really good job.
And I had gotten a really good job.
And I had started as an editor at Wired Magazine.
And that had been in September of 2005.
And the diagnosis was November of 2005.
I'd sold a book proposal in that same month or maybe the month after.
So I was on top of the world in so many ways.
And then...
Whoa, you're knocked down a lot.
Yeah, your 20s was also an interesting time for you from a running perspective.
You wrote in your book that you wrote that you trained like a dilettante in your 20s.
What did you mean by that?
There's some mysteries about my life.
And that I don't understand.
So I was a good runner in high school.
You know, like I ran like 850 for 3000 meters.
It's like a 932 mile.
Like, that's good.
It's not amazing, but it's good.
I went to Stanford University, like, Best cross-country team in America.
I was a walk-on, left the team after a year but, like I, was a very good runner with clearly a lot of talent right.
And I was clearly born and blessed with genetics to run well and whatever.
I start in my 20s.
And I think maybe because of my dad, the reference was like my God, if I could break a three-hour marathon, that would be amazing.
And so that becomes the only goal.
I think the first book I read on running was like the Jeff Galloway book where it's like walk three days a week, you know, do some long runs and do some short runs.
And I kind of did that except for the long runs.
I would like walk three days a week, jog two days a week.
And so my first marathon.
I go out there and you know, I just completely blow up, as you would expect.
And then, like for the rest of my marathons, I just like no one told me that to actually run a three hour marathon and there weren't podcasts.
I just didn't know what to do.
I read a few books.
And then I was like I don't know, run like 40 miles a week with like one long run, and then try to run a fast marathon.
It doesn't work, even if you're like talented.
And so you know I ran.
I ran like a 318 in that first marathon where I'm like walking and throwing up on myself at the end.
I then run a 306, which is nice, and then get a flat tire on the way to the next marathon, drop out, get sick, run a 340.
It's just a mess.
My running's a mess.
And then I like figure it out and it's like, okay, boom, 257, 243.
Like a big change.
Was consistency a big part of that?
It sounds like you were a little all over the place with time off, with not running a lot, sometimes running a lot.
I don't think I knew how to train hard.
Like I just didn't.
I didn't know how to run a workout.
I didn't know what a long run was.
I didn't know anything.
I have this log and it just be like ran 20 miles.
Like, did I actually run 20 miles or did I run 16?
Like I don't you know and like sort of the precision and knowledge that I have now, where it's like I ran 20 miles the first time I ran at this pace with this heart rate.
And the next time I ran at this, just completely different different different, different way of doing it.
But I still thought of myself as a runner.
It was still part of my identity.
It was just my level of knowledge was minuscule.
And I like running in these like big shoes.
I don't know, I just didn't know what I was doing.
Yeah, knowledge is, I say often that knowledge is a competitive advantage.
The more you know, the better you're gonna be able to structure things, the wiser decisions you're gonna be able to make.
And I think one of the big turning points for you, not only sort of at the tail end of your 20s when you started training more seriously, but it was when a group of elite coaches started training you.
And soon you were...
Running personal records in your mid-40s.
A couple years later is when you had some of your more notable achievements.
Like you, set an American age group record in the 50K.
I think a few years later you became the world's top-ranked runner in your age group in the 50-mile world.
What did you start doing differently at that moment in time for these incredible results?
I'd love to know more about sort of this before and after approach to your training.
Yeah, since this is a Running Nerd podcast, I'm glad we can get into this.
Because in the book I'm pretty relentless in the book about making sure that even someone who doesn't know anything about running will never lose interest.
And people who were non-runners would be like, boring.
But since I'm with you, no longer boring.
So they did a whole bunch of things.
So these coaches reached out from Nike.
I was the editor-in-chief of Wired.
Obviously, they've been told to reach out because I'm the editor-in-chief of Wired.
And they offered to help train me, Steve Finley, Brett Kirby, Joe Holder.
All amazing people.
Increase my mileage.
Right.
So I was probably running.
And before that, I had run a 243 marathon.
And then it takes them 15 months to get me down to a 229, which is a big change in your mid 40s.
Increase my mileage.
So I go from like 50 miles a week to 60 to 70 to 80, like gradually building it up much more focused work.
You know, at that point, when I was running the 243, I was probably running one hard workout a week.
And then they're shifting it to two two hard workouts a week, one tempo, one threshold and then a long run.
They quickly figure out that if they give me a schedule, I will do the tempo and the threshold precisely.
Like if they say do four by two miles at 550 with 90 seconds recovery, I will do that precisely, but that I will do more than they tell me on the long run.
So if they tell me to run 18 on Sunday, I'll run 22.
So they figure that out and then they just tell me to run 16 knowing that I'll run 20.
So I'm doing two hard workouts a week and then that.
As I go through the cycle, we layer on as we go through, like different races, we start to add on more things, right?
So they add strides, right, to sort of increase explosiveness.
And I'm doing three hard days a week with strides.
Then we add on a cool workout on Fridays where it's not a full workout, but I'm doing like tempo on Tuesday, threshold on Thursday, Fridays, I'm running like 12 miles at 640 pace, right?
To kind of stress the system and then Sunday long run.
I'm experimenting a little bit with some core work to try to increase my resiliency, though I don't do very much of that.
And they eventually give up on trying to get me to do it.
I just don't do it.
Um, I never really add in much cross training.
I don't add like it's before anybody knows about saunas or before I know about saunas.
I don't do sauna.
Don't do altitude.
Um, you know, it's just really like pushing on um pushing on the threshold workouts and the tempo workouts.
And then, like Steve Finley um, you know, brings me this, you know, creates this Google Doc that has every workout.
Actually, you know what would be fun?
I've never done this on a podcast.
If I share my screen, can I share my screen on Riverside and you can see the Google Doc?
That is a great question.
Let's give it the old college try and see.
Can you see this?
Oh my God, it is.
Look at this.
Nick, the level of running nerdery on display right now is incredible.
All right, so let's go to... So this is the first marathon I run.
Let's go to Chicago 2019.
So this is when I ran my 229.
Okay, so...
It's a, so week one of the cycle here.
Um, these are the dates.
So what Steve, Steve writes out what I should do.
So run option means whatever.
So I've commuted in 10 miles total.
Four mile tempo averaging 543, tempo on the Brooklyn bridge, right?
Run option Thursday.
I'm like listing where I am, what I'm doing.
Let's go to sort of like late in the cycle.
So you can see I'm running about 75 miles a week here.
Oh yeah, three by three miles at 540s, 525, 525.
So 540, 525, 525, 90 second rest.
So I'm like, okay, I did the first three at 539, two minutes rest.
So it took a little extra rest.
Three at 534, three minutes rest. and a park loop.
Anyway, you can just see exactly how I'm communicating on all this stuff.
And then we kept this Google Doc that shows, so that's the 2018 race.
This is 2019.
And so we just kept doing it for a whole while.
And that's what I did.
The hardest part is maintaining the progression over a long period of time.
Because there's something to be said about.
It's relatively easy running 30 40 miles a week, but as soon as you're running 80 miles a week, it's sort of an all-hands-on-deck sort of approach almost on a daily basis, because every day is sort of important.
It's a higher volume, you have a workout.
I'm wondering, like how you managed sort of the mental load of just doing a lot more work and having to be more intentional with it.
I know it's hard, right?
I'm in it right now where I'm like trying to run 70 miles a week and I don't have any time today.
I had time to run one mile, right?
Um, You know, I like I literally couldn't run before the kids woke up because I got up at six.
The kids are gonna be down at seven.
But if I go out for a run, the dog is going to wake up my wife.
Right.
So I couldn't run.
So I have to work from six to seven.
So then I like have a mile.
But I had to go to a conference.
Anyway, so like and when you have one day with one mile, it's very hard to get in a 70 mile week.
So it is tricky.
The logistics are tricky.
I do have a built in advantage today.
I couldn't do it because I had an event tonight.
Today I have I had a work event at 830 in the morning and I have work events until nine o'clock at night.
So I can't run.
To work and I can't run from work.
But most days I run to the office and I run home from the office.
So I've got built in eight miles.
Then the grind is like finding the time to do those workouts on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Sundays.
Sundays I can do, usually I can get up.
5 in the morning on a Sunday and go run 25 miles.
I give the dog to the grandparents.
Dog will go to sleep if he goes down there.
He'll wake my wife up.
Complicated.
So it's just, anyway, there's scheduling complexities.
The other question is the like the sort of ever-present fatigue you have when you're training that hard right?
And...
I think what happened is I came to really like it.
I came to sort of like how much it hurt to get up out of a chair after a meeting at work when I was running 80 or 75, 80 miles a week.
Nick, I think that's weird, but I also feel exactly the same way as you.
I loved that feeling too, but it also is kind of a strange thing to be like.
Oh, I just love having trouble getting out of bed in the morning.
Yeah, well, it's like it's, you know what happens is like, you know that pain means progress.
Like you hurt because your muscles are growing, right?
You don't hurt because something is broken.
You hurt because there's a process of tear and repair right.
So pain means progress and progress means pleasure.
And so you actually experience the pain as pleasure because you know what's happening.
And so I began to just really like that.
Yeah, it's definitely a feeling that I do think runners can get a little bit addicted to, because it's emblematic of that progress.
Hey, I'm progressing.
I'm breaking myself down a little bit, which means I'm going to super compensate.
And oh boy, next thing you know, you're getting excited about that level of soreness.
Speaking of soreness and tough schedules, what advice might you have for a master's runner who wants to train hard?
Who's maybe contemplating a comeback?
I think it's both a very exciting time to get back into running in your 40s, but it can also be a difficult time to get back into running, into hard training.
So some things are hard, um so, and some things change.
I i don't know if this is everybody but, like every year, getting started on a run becomes harder right, and if i were to, like you know you go run a tempo run and you go run a workout on the first mile, just like every year gets slower.
Right.
And like or I'll go do a long run and let's say I want to go run 20 miles, you know, and I want to go.
I want to average out on a seven, 30 case.
Like my first mile is always like nine 15.
I just can't, And five years ago, I could go and just go run 730 and 730.
It takes a while for the body and the engine to kind of heat up.
So that's one difference.
Another thing that's really important if you're trying to come back, you have to let go of racing against your former self.
Um, you know, so if you've read, if you ran two 39, right?
Like you can't like.
You don't want to have those same feelings that you can't like.
You have such a mental framework that, like everything should be at a six minute mile pace.
And you just, you can't have that.
You have to come back and be like, it's okay to be at a seven minute mile pace.
And, in fact, what I would recommend, like when I start a training cycle after a period off when I know I'm in much worse shape, I do fartleks and hill workouts.
I don't do time workouts because I don't want to even have in my mind.
Right.
I just did four by a mile and I was 30 seconds off.
I know I'm like you would think that rationally I could justify it, just as I can justify doing going up a hill a little bit slower.
But like I'll just do like four minutes on, three minutes off, or I'm going to run 12 times up the hill.
And not even look at my watch, because I know that once I start to compare it to who I was and what I did, it won't go well.
So let go of the comparing where you are now with where you were.
And then...
Maybe do a different goal or a different race.
For your first race back, don't do a distance you've done before.
Run like a 12K.
So the time isn't...
You don't feel bad about the time.
Or even better, go run a 10K on a mountain ridge where the time is irrelevant.
And I think that's kind of an easier way to get back into it.
Yeah, I work with a lot of athletes who are coming from sort of the chronic two to three marathon a year cycle.
And I've found that getting them into event distances that they don't have much experience in, or no experience at all, is not just a wonderful way of kind of spurring the additional progress they might need to then go back to the marathon and get better at it, but also just reignite more love for the sport, more motivation, more engagement.
They just find it's much more exciting when they're not running the same race distances over and over again.
And Again, hindsight's 20-20.
When I look back on my own running career, I was always looking for something new, whether it was running longer distances in college.
I even convinced my high school coach once to let me compete, to let me triple in one meet with the mile, the 200 in the long jump.
What?
I don't know why I was doing the long jump.
I do not have the speed, Nick, to be in a 200-meter race.
But nevertheless, it was just fun.
The mile 200 double, that is a rare one.
Yeah, very strange.
But yeah, I got to college and I was like, I want to do the steeplechase.
Let me do trail races and duathlon and triathlon after college.
And I just think it's such an amazing way to learn about yourself as a person and your athletic capabilities to have that just extra experience and all kinds of weird and wacky events.
I'm like distance agnostic.
I don't really care what you're racing.
As long as you're racing, that's awesome.
I think that's like where you get the mental health benefits and you get the psychological benefits is just from racing and being out there.
There's nothing special about the marathon or the 10K.
Yeah.
Do you think if someone is not necessarily making a comeback in their 40s or starting to run in their 40s, but they're running normally and they feel good, but they want to sort of have that same experience as you?
They want to really start taking it more seriously.
They want to have these performance breakthroughs despite their age.
What advice would you have for that person?
Would that be a little bit different?
It would be quite different.
It would be to think seriously about Look at the way you trained, right?
And think about the variables that you can adjust.
And there's so many different things that you can adjust to go better.
And so probably, if you want to go faster in your 40s than you did in your 30s, you'll have to do more or differently, right?
You'll have to train smarter or you'll have to train more ideally smarter, because then it takes less time.
But so break apart what you did and like okay, you ran 50 miles, you run 60.
Or like, go and add some altitude training or add strength training or add cross training right, try to figure out some kind of variable.
And it's also what's harder is that you get in your 40s.
Your life is more complicated right, you're caring for children, you're caring for caring for parents, right?
Like maybe a more serious job, right?
Like forties are harder than thirties, you know, um, in most ways, right.
Or you have more things like maybe that's not fair to say, but you have more like fixed responsibilities and um, Maybe when you get to your 50s, maybe it goes in the other direction.
Who knows?
But it's like the peak of the complexity of your life.
And so you generally don't have more time.
But you can think through what you did and then identify where you can do more or where you can do it better.
And you can look at your old logs and say, OK, you know the key thing that I wasn't able to do?
Key thing I wasn't able to do is I wasn't able to really push myself in the workouts, right?
For whatever reason.
And then figure out what it takes to really push yourself in workouts.
Or the key thing that I wasn't able to get enough mileage, right?
And then work it in.
And then you can get better, right?
So like age is this moving sidewalk, right?
And it pushes us backwards, pushes us backwards slowly, right?
And if we do all the same things, we move back slowly.
But if we do things differently, we're going forward against the moving sidewalk and you can actually get faster and better.
What are some of the things that you might recommend that might be low effort, high reward?
I know there are no shortcuts, but some things do work a little bit better than others.
There are shortcuts.
There are shortcuts.
Lots of shortcuts.
Tell me the shortcuts, Nick.
I can just tell you the things that worked for me.
I'll tell you the things that I think are low effort that are beneficial.
I do think that they're dietary things that are like very low effort that are beneficial, right?
You can drink beet juice, right?
Just finished beet juice, right?
You can take L-citrulline supplements.
You can like take, there's like a set of, you can take creatine, right?
You, um, There's a small subset of things that we know work, right?
We know that caffeine works.
We know that creatine works.
We know that nitrates work, right?
Those all make you faster.
We know that baking soda works if you can do it without barfing on yourself, which I can't do, so I don't take it.
Right.
Then there's a whole level of things that you can take that like maybe work, maybe don't work.
That's where the L-citrulline is.
But anyway.
So there's like some dietary changes you can make, you know being generally healthier and being within like the range of weight you want to be in.
But on the lighter end, that also helps.
Right.
Great.
Cross training helps and can be easy and you can work it in.
Like we set up an exercise bicycle by the TV.
Like I can ride the bike while I'm watching the TV, right?
So it's no extra time.
And if you know, we're watching a movie.
My wife is not used to it.
It's fine.
I ride the bike or I'm doing planks or I'm doing sit-ups.
Like you can kind of like work in their ways to work in.
I mean, hell, I was just, I don't know if anybody noticed.
I was like, my picture changed because I was stretching my Achilles tendon.
Right.
And like I was literally like multitasking on this conversation.
And like there are things that you can do to work it into your daily life.
Other shortcuts.
I do think that we know now that saunas are a shortcut.
Right.
You can go to the sauna 15 minutes, three times a week or do some kind of a heat training.
Like I did that before my last 50 mile race, the one where I took the world lead.
I don't know.
Did it help?
I think probably, you know, it did help.
I do think that, like you know adding, if you don't run hill, you don't run up and down, you don't run up hills hard, helps your stride, makes you land on your forefoot.
It's a really good thing to add, like add 30 seconds of hill sprints, you know eight times a week.
Like the benefit gains from that.
And then the real shortcut, I mean, it depends on where you are in your training life.
The real shortcut is like learning how to make yourself hurt, and like learning how to do that twice a week.
I often think that when I'm doing a workout, right?
And I'm obviously not like an amazing, amazing runner.
I'm like a good runner.
But what like the...
The thing I have that I think is most important is that like I always do it right.
There's like 12 workouts, 12 weeks, two workouts.
That's 24 workouts.
Each one's like 30 minutes of hard work, right?
So you're doing like 10 hours, 12 hours of hard work in this whole cycle.
That affects your VO2 max and all this stuff.
It's not a lot of time.
Like, it's hard in it, you know, but you just have to kind of push through and do it.
And so I was running, I don't know, a five-mile tempo run yesterday morning.
And it kind of frustrated me.
I was doing really badly, you know, and I was...
Sort of depressed, right?
I wanted to run 550s.
I was running like 605, 610, right?
Which is a bummer.
Pretty easy to stop at four.
Would have made my route home a little easier.
But I was like, I committed to five.
I'm doing five.
If you've committed to run seven easy miles and you want to run five, who cares?
But like twice or three times a week, you actually have to care and focus.
And I think that's a shortcut.
Yeah, those are all such great best practices.
Get your diet right which, I think it's important to add too, is probably more important in your 40s than in your 20s and 30s.
You have less wiggle room to eat, the way that you might have gotten away with when you were 25 years old.
I think that's true, right?
You see these NBA athletes who have French fries.
You're like, how do you do that?
Like, I can't, I couldn't do that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a there's a lot of liberties you can take, especially when you're when you're young and have the hormonal profile.
I was thinking about like Andre de Grasse, right?
But like, it was, one of his coaches was doing a podcast.
Like it was like a rich roll podcast or something.
He's like, I don't know.
He's like, I tried to get them to eat right.
But, like Andre de Grasse, had a Like in between winning the 100 and the 200 or whatever he did, silver and gold had like eaten a giant, like pepperoni sub or something.
I don't know.
I mean, the calories that those guys are burning too is just incredible.
So I guess being well-fueled, there's something to say about that.
But most of us, are probably not burning 2000 calories a day with with our training.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, Nick, I really appreciate your time and your thoughts on on running your thoughts on life.
You know, I have to add to one of my favorite running books is why we run by burned Heinrich.
Of course I've read that.
That book's awesome.
It's interesting because half the book isn't really about running.
No, it's about insects.
Right.
It's a little strange, but nevertheless, it is such a unique look at the sport.
I feel like you've done something similar with your new book, The Running Ground.
Thank you.
That's a great compliment.
That book, that Burns book is awesome.
Oh, it's one of the books I recommend.
It's not a training book.
However, it will open your eyes to a side of the sport that I think we rarely get to see.
But I think you've done something similar with the running ground.
You know, it's part memoir.
It's part training log.
It's part race recap.
It captures so much of the essence of the sport that even though I'm only a couple chapters in, it's one of these books.
I just can't wait to finish because it really speaks to some of the emotions around running, some of the ways in which it changes your life.
So thank you so much for writing it.
I really feel like it's going to give a lot of runners a lot of value.
And you know it will be successful if, when you finish it Jason, you finish it, you're like you know what.
I'm going back out there.
I'm going to run another marathon six months from now.
That's my KPI.
I got to touch base with you afterwards.
That might be a possibility.
All right.
Send me an email like two weeks after you finished.
And if your training volume and intensity volume is up, I'll have succeeded.
I love it.
Nick, thanks so much for your time.
I appreciate it.
I hope everyone goes and gets the book, The Running Ground.
It's being released on October 28th.
Yep, October 28th.
Find it anywhere.
Jason, thank you so much.
Thank you for letting me share my spreadsheets.
Nick, I wouldn't have it any other way.
Thank you.
Cheers.
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