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Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's episode is going to be a longer one, part of the series where I

interview fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome and any advice

they have for the rest of us. So today I'm delighted to welcome Nicholas Thompson to Before

Breakfast. Nick is the CEO of the Atlantic and the author of the new book The Running Ground,

which is a memoir about his

family and his amateur but very serious running life. So, Nick, welcome to the show. Thanks, Laura.

It's nice to be here. Thanks for coming on. Why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about

yourself? Well, I'm CEO of the Atlantic, which is an amazing publication. It covers American

life. It's been around since 1857, founded by Ralph Waldo, Emerson, Henry, David Thoreau, Harry Beecher Stowe. Try to prevent a civil war. We try to publish smart, thoughtful, interesting pieces about the world. I used to work at Wired. I was the editor there. Before that, I worked at The New Yorker, and I run probably more than as healthy.

Yeah. I was just thinking, those are some big shoes to fill on the Atlantic side.

Hopefully, we'll prevent any future Civil Wars, even if they didn't succeed on that.

But I want to talk with you mostly today about running and your schedule, because this is a productivity podcast. So people want to hear

about how you're fitting that in. But first, I mean, most people assume like athletic achievements

are something happened when you're on the younger side. You know, maybe like your 20s. And yet,

you actually had your biggest running successes as a not so young anymore person. Can you tell us a little bit about your, an old person? Can you tell us a little bit about your running journey? Yeah, sure. I started running when I was a little kid. My dad would take me running when I was five or six. And then I kind of stopped. I ran again in high school. It was pretty good in high school, but not good enough for college. In my 20s, I ran, started running marathons. I tried to break three hours.

Kind of broke it when I was 30. In my 30s, I was pretty good. I ran like 243 for a marathon, which is good. I ran that over and over again. But then in my mid-40s, you got much better. And I ran a 229 marathon, which is quite fast. And then I set the American record in the 50K. And then I ran, you know, one of the fastest times in the world

for the 50 mile for my age. And so that's really quite a bit different. So I was much faster in my

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