Atlantic CEO Nick Thompson on What Running Can Teach Us

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Science, Social Sciences, Society & Culture, Education

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 30 October 2025

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Nick Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic. But he moonlights as a damn good runner. At 44, he ran a marathon in 2 hours and 29 minutes, making him one of the fastest marathoners his age on the planet. He later set an American age group record in the 50K. He has run in blazing heat with ice tucked into his hat and in frigid cold with Vaseline dabbed on his nose. He's run up sunny mountain trails and down dark city streets. He has run, and run, and run some more. His relationship with the sport is the subject of his new memoir, The Running Ground. It's a book about the fragile boundary between love and obsession, between progress and suffering. And it's about the way we all run in loops: away from the past and then back toward it. (4:35) Nick reads from The Running Ground (8:00) On his father: "Not a simple guy" (16:34) How the sport finds you (30:00) A personal best, then a cancer diagnosis (40:56) The four states of running bliss (and how to reach them) (46:29) How Nick got faster in his forties (49:14) The big takeaway (50:33) Want to start running? Do this. (53:14) Is running actually good for you?

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Caleb Bissinger. This is the next big idea.
0:04.3	Today on the show, I'm chatting with Nick Thompson. He's the CEO of the Atlantic, and he's just
0:09.7	published a new memoir. It's called The Running Ground. It's about his lifelong obsession with
0:15.4	running. It's a story about being able to push back against these forces in life that should make you slower, that do make you older, but to go in the other direction.
0:24.8	His relationship was his brilliant, troubled father.
0:27.8	Part of the reason why I want to understand my father is to not be him.
0:32.3	And a shocking diagnosis.
0:34.2	I had like a lot of knee pain, and I was like, well, if I see my doctor, he'll tell me I can't run the marathon.
0:39.3	So I delay the appointment until right after the race and go and see him and forget about the knee pain, who cares?
0:45.3	Like, what's this?
0:46.3	Whether or not you're a runner, and I'm not, the book and this conversation serve as a guide to finding that thing, a passion, a hobby,
0:56.5	whatever you want to call it, that makes you feel present, which is another way of saying
1:01.5	fully intoxicatingly alive. That's all coming up, but first, a couple of ads. Kurt Vonnegut said that if you want to flatter someone, it's better to praise their minor
1:22.8	secret vanities than their major accomplishments.
1:26.4	So today, I'm going to praise the minor secret
1:29.0	vanities of my guest, Nick Thompson. We are not going to focus on his role as the CEO of the
1:34.8	Atlantic, where he managed to dig the 168-year-old magazine out of a $20 million hole and make it
1:40.3	profitable. We are not going to spend our time together talking about his wildly popular LinkedIn video series,
1:46.2	the most interesting thing in tech.
1:48.2	Instead, we're going to talk about running.
1:51.0	Nick Moonlights as a damn good runner.
1:54.1	At 44, he ran a marathon in two hours and 29 minutes,
	...

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