The Running Ground Quotes

“We give our children our genes and our love, and we don’t have any idea of what, in the end, they’ll do with them. My grandfather scarred my father by trying to push him into sports; my father inspired me by taking me running around the block. Maybe one of my sons will write a tell-all one day about the pressure his father put on him to be something he didn’t want to be. Maybe they’ll write about these days on the track or running around the park, in anger. Or maybe they’ll find that they love the sport too. One day, off in the future, if I’m lucky, I’ll be handing one of them a gel on Atlantic Avenue or offering a new pair of shoes on the downside of the Queensboro Bridge. Maybe the passion will skip a generation, but I’ll still end up drinking beet juice with my grandkids. My father led a deeply complicated and broken life. But he gave me many things, including the gift of running—a gift that opens the world to anyone who accepts it.”
― Nicholas Thompson, The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports

“I’ve struggled for years with the question of inheritance: what we give our children, what they reject from us, what they absorb without really knowing it. My father gave me his drive, which he in turn had been given by his father. I went to the same schools and did the same things; I took up his sport and developed a love for his music. For better or worse, I inherited what a don at Oxford once called his “absolute inexhaustibility,” and also what the don described as his difficulty focusing in a single direction. I did not inherit his sexuality. I did not inherit his alcoholism, at least not yet. I pay my taxes. I fell in love with someone the same age who has never tried to drug our dog. I have yet to inherit the professional insecurities my father had in his 40s and 50s, but that may come. I don’t yet know what my children will take from me, and it doesn’t seem fair to speculate. They are still too young. They have their own lives and dreams, and my objective in parenting is to try to support them as best I can in the lives they want to live. They’re very different boys. I’m sure that, once they’re adults, I’ll be able to see the ways in which Danielle and I shaped them for good and for ill. I’m sure they’ll have theories about the ways we stunted them or led them astray.”
― Nicholas Thompson, The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports

“There are four states of running that I consider bliss. The first is meditation: you’re running up a mountain or crossing a ridge. You’re alone, studying the trees or the sky. Your feet land quietly on the soil, the leaves, the rocks. The kaleidoscope wheel of the mind slows. You don’t have to be going fast, but, for me at least, it helps to be doing something hard. I couldn’t reach this state if I took a gondola to the most beautiful vista in the world and started there. I can only reach it if I’ve run up a narrow trail, following painted marks on the trees, piles of rocks, or just the faint trace of runners and animals that have gone this route before. This is the kind of run I hope I can go on for at least another decade or two. The second is flow. Here you’re out on a road, pushing hard. You’re going fast and feeling strong, moving steadily and rhythmically. Your mind is active and fully present in the motion. It helps if the road is flat and the weather isn’t great. A little bit of wind or rain adds flavor to the sport. This is the state I dream about when I start to get in shape. I know that more of these runs are behind me than ahead of me, but the places where I’ve done these runs are forever etched in my mind. The third is catharsis. Something has gone wrong in the world or in your life, and you’re not able to fully process it. You’re not running to seek shelter; you’re running because you seek the storm. Your mind is like molten metal and you have to run hard and heat everything up before you can cool into a new shape. My friend Michael Joyner of the Mayo Clinic, and a former 2:25 marathoner, told me that the most intense stage of his running life came when he was getting divorced. The way to handle the pain of his life was to go out on the track and create even more pain there. The last state is oneness, and it’s the hardest to reach. I can only get it at the end of a long race, and, usually, I don’t even get it there. I’m still in control of my speed and my effort. I’ve calibrated things so that I know exactly how much energy I have left. I can’t hear my friends on the sides of the course, and my field of vision has narrowed. Brain and body have merged entirely into one, but I’m not shutting down. This is the true bliss: when you know you’ve calibrated things perfectly. You’re exhausted but you’re still moving forward exactly the way you want to.”
― Nicholas Thompson, The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports

“There are strategies to counter this, starting with taking in carbohydrates as you run—drinking energy drinks or sucking down sweet, sticky, sickly blobs of carbohydrate gel. But the simplest thing is not to do what I did in Rhode Island and burn precious carbohydrate stores screwing around at the start. Now, to warm up for a marathon, I do almost nothing. I often sit near the start reading a magazine or newspaper that I can throw away. I try to lower my heart rate and relax my mind. I drink water and eat bananas and, usually, a bagel with peanut butter. Eventually, I get up, walk, and maybe jog for a minute. Then I amble over to the start.”
― Nicholas Thompson, The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports

“The marathon requires a different kind of warm-up, largely because it’s an event with bewitching math. Your body goes fastest when it’s burning carbohydrates, not proteins or fats. If you down your linguine properly before race day, you can store about 2,000 calories in carbs. Most of this energy is held as glycogen in your muscles, with a smaller amount in your liver. But 2,000 calories is not enough. You burn about 100 calories each mile you run,”
― Nicholas Thompson, The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports

“Everyone, including me, thought it was done. My teammates on the sidelines looked downcast. Then something inside me changed. I don’t know what it was or where it came from, but it’s a feeling I’ve often tried to summon since. I suddenly felt calmer and stronger; everything inside me quieted and then intensified. I began to move faster, effortlessly. It was as though the track was now pointing down at a 10-degree angle. I started to accelerate. He was a zebra in the distance, and I was a cheetah sprinting toward him. I can still see, and feel, that gap shrinking. I almost didn’t believe it.”
― Nicholas Thompson, The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports

“For some people, an obsession with running closes other doors in the mind, but it just seemed to make my internal engine run hotter: I wanted to study harder than anyone else on campus, and I wanted to run faster than anyone else in New England. I would routinely stay up most of the night working, and I’d start doing homework the minute my alarm chimed on Sunday mornings. I set up a NordicTrack cross-country skiing simulator in my dorm room and spent hours cross-training while listening to instructional cassettes about guitar playing. I look back and see a kid who was driving himself too hard. But teenage years can be treacherous if you don’t have a purpose, and I had found mine. I’m proud to know that kid was me.”
― Nicholas Thompson, The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports

“I learned something from that track at Moses Brown, something I’ve come back to countless times in my life. If I had understood how fast I was running, I wouldn’t have been able to run that fast. Because I didn’t know the track, because I didn’t know how long the laps were, I didn’t get scared and shut down my body. I just kept going. To do it, I had to first forget that I couldn’t do it.”
― Nicholas Thompson, The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports

“As in all things in my life, my father wanted me to excel and to win. My mother wanted me to be true to myself, content, and kind to others.”
― Nicholas Thompson, The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports

“The qualities of “patience” and “endurance” are so similar that they are the same word in Greek, hypomonē. As the apostle Paul wrote, “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” I think my mother could have been an excellent marathoner.”
― Nicholas Thompson, The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports

“One time, early in our relationship, I was at Danielle’s parents’ house. We had a family meal and then, at 10 p.m., I headed out for a run. After I had left, my future mother-in-law asked what on earth was wrong with me. “The thing you have to understand,” Danielle said, “is that he enjoys it.”
― Nicholas Thompson, The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports