Running is the simplest of sports: right foot, left foot, right foot. But the simplicity opens up complexity. There’s no ball to focus on, no mat to land on, no one charging toward you with their shoulder down. And so your attention shifts inward. As you run, you’re just you—right foot and left foot, nature and nurture, whatever goes on in your mind.
My relationship to the sport begins in Bacone, Oklahoma, in the mid-1940s. My father, Scott Thompson, grew up there as the shy, misfit son of a domineering Baptist minister. Frank Thompson, or Granddad, was an imposing oak of a man with eyebrows the size of muskrats. He was a Golden Gloves boxing champion and wanted his only son to obsess about sports, but my father was uncoordinated and athletically indifferent. He wanted to read books and listen to The Marriage of Figaro. Eventually, my dad escaped his unhappy home for boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts. He applied in secret, paying the application fees with money he earned on his paper route. He did well there and won a scholarship to Stanford and a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. His friends from that time remember him as a flurry of energy, wit, and charisma. After meeting my father on campus in 1960, John F. Kennedy was quoted in The Saturday Evening Post that Scotty Thompson might make it to the White House before he did.
After he completed his studies, my father married my mother and began an adult life of constant motion, ambition, and enthusiasm. He barely slept; he began publishing books and became a tenured professor; he made plans to run for office. But he also started drinking too much, smoking too much, going out too much. By the time he was closing in on 40—an age, he would often say, when all men’s lives fall apart—he needed some discipline in the fermented mayhem of his days. As he would later tell me, running was the rare sport where you mostly competed against yourself. You could learn without having to lose. It was also something he hadn’t failed at in front of his father.
In 1980, when my dad started putting on his running shoes, I was 5, and naturally, I wanted to tag along. I remember him driving his car around the block where we lived just outside of Boston with his eye on the odometer. Start at the front door by the boxwoods, turn left and left again. Go two full loops around the block; on the third, stop at the gate in the fence just past the beech tree. That’s 1 mile. I remember the triumph of running the whole thing by his side. He was obsessed with his physical appearance, and he would teach me to do push-ups in the backyard and sit-ups with a round metal weight he kept under the bed. He began to race too. On my bedroom wall I have a photo from around that time of him running a 5-mile road race in Maine. He’s wearing a red Lacoste polo shirt and socks that could stretch to his knees but are squished down at his ankles.
Two years later I went to New York to watch him run a marathon. My parents had divorced by then, and my father had moved to Washington, DC. He had a good job—but he hadn’t exactly followed the path of John Kennedy. He was an associate director at the United States Information Agency, which meant he promoted Ronald Reagan’s Cold War policies to the world. He lived in Dupont Circle and alternated runs of 12 and 6 miles every morning. He had gotten good. I searched for him in the sea of sweaty people in short shorts coming down the Queensboro Bridge. He spotted me and hustled to the side. I handed him a cup of orange juice and gave him a new pair of shoes. He gulped, laced up, smiled, and hurried along. His goal was to finish in under three hours, and he came close: 3: 01: 19. I didn’t have much sense of how the sport worked—or, for that matter, how physical pain or time worked—and for years I would wonder why he just hadn’t sprinted at the end.
After the race he pledged to go faster in the next one. But life wasn’t going to work that way. My father soon came out as gay. Not long after that he tested positive for HIV. It was the start of the plague years for that disease. Running faster wasn’t much of a priority anymore.
II.
I started running for real at age 15, not long after being cut from the tryouts for the sophomore basketball team at Andover, my father’s alma mater. My self-confidence was at a nadir. I was pimply, nerdy, and, for the first time, living away from the love and support of my mother, who had heroically raised my two sisters and me after my father moved away. I was overmatched and trapped in a place where I didn’t yet feel at home. One memory sticks in my mind as a metaphor for that time: I was in the dining room of a house on campus one afternoon, quietly preparing for a biology test, when one of my dormmates—a star on the football team—started making out with someone against the other side of the main door out.
Sophomores were required to play sports, and indoor track was still accepting castaways. So I wandered over and told the coach I wanted to join. He sent me off with the boys running the 2-mile, and, for my first few races, I completed the 21 loops around the oval in just under 12 minutes, putting me right about average. My coach, though, saw potential and entered me in the New England Prep School championships. And then, on a magical day in February 1991, at a school called Moses Brown, I discovered a gear I didn’t know I had.
The track was an unfamiliar size, so I didn’t have context for the times they announced after each lap. I wondered if there had been an error when the time for the first mile was called—5: 25, by far my fastest ever. I finished in fifth place in a class-record time of 10 minutes and 48 seconds. The football star read about it in the school paper and congratulated me. I had practiced reasonably hard, but you don’t set records because of two months of doing the same workouts as everyone else. Clearly, my genes had played a role.
My father, meanwhile, had been given the most valuable mulligan one can get. A year after his diagnosis, he’d entered into a study of HIV-positive men, only to be informed that his initial diagnosis had been incorrect; he was HIV-free. Years later, he would tell me that the initial death sentence was what had enabled him to live. Until he was forced to confront what dying would actually mean, his sexual choices had been reckless. His days of competitive running, though, were behind him. By the time I picked up the sport in high school, he was in his early fifties, and his back, his knees, and his constantly blackened toenails wouldn’t let him go for more than a few miles. He was a man who liked to do things all in or not at all. He put his running shoes away.
Boys improve more or less linearly at running until they turn into men. If you train steadily, your hormones work in concert with your muscles. Add increasing self-confidence to the mix and you get a positive feedback loop: Speed leads to confidence leads to speed. By my senior year, I was a New England prep school track champion and headed off to Stanford and the Pac-10. But the pattern of improvement only holds if you stay healthy. The summer before I started college, I increased my weekly running miles from about 35 to about 70. My legs got stronger, but then they frayed. I showed up on campus with a stress fracture in my shin expecting to run cross-country races. A few months later, just as I was gingerly trying to train again, a doctor told me I had mononucleosis. The next summer I swam in polluted water and came down with hepatitis. I knew something was wrong when, on a run in the woods of Northeast Harbor, Maine, I stopped by a bed of moss and saw my pee had turned black.
Quitting the team was hard, but not running was easy. I convinced myself that the focus required by Division I sports would have narrowed the aperture of my college imagination. With no track practice, I had time for a million other things, including playing acoustic guitar. And so the fall after graduation, I moved to a farm in New Hampshire to concentrate on music.
At some point that summer, though, sitting by a granite stone wall and feeling lonely, I decided to try racing again. I was reaching inside myself because there was less going on outside. The realization that I wasn’t good enough at guitar to make it my life was hitting