The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports

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Jan 12 2026 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm

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The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports

BONUS BOOK GIVEAWAY! FAN is giving away copies of The Running Ground to randomly selected Zoom attendees. Details on the webinar registration page.

For Nicholas Thompson, author of the new book The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports, running has always been about something more than putting one foot in front of another. He ran his first mile at age five, using it to connect with his father as his family fell apart. As a young man, it was a sport that transformed, and then shook, his sense of self-worth. In his 30s, it was a way of coping with a profound medical scare.

By his early 40s, Thompson had many accomplishments. He was the editor in chief of a major magazine; a devoted husband and father; and a passionate runner. But he was haunted by the recent death of his brilliant, complicated father and the crack-up that derailed his father’s life. Had the intensity and ambition he’d inherited made a personal crisis inevitable for him as well?

Then a chance offer gave him the opportunity to train for the Chicago Marathon with elite coaches. Giving himself over to the sport more fully than ever before, he discovered that aging didn’t necessarily put you on an unbroken trajectory of decline. For seven years after his father died, Thompson transforms his body to perform at its highest capacity, and the profound discipline and awareness he builds along the way changes every aspect of his life. Throughout the narrative, he weaves in stories of remarkable men and women who have used the sport to transcend some of the hardest moments in life.

The Running Ground is a story about fathers, sons, and the most basic and most beautiful of sports.

Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic, a position he has held since 2021. He was previously the editor-in-chief of WIRED and the editor of NewYorker.com. He films a daily video on tech policy for LinkedIn and has roughly two million followers across social media platforms. He writes a monthly newsletter, The Most Interesting Reads, which currently has about 500,000 readers, about the best things he has read recently.

Thompson has long been a competitive runner; in 2021, he set the American record for men 45+ in the 50K race.

Thompson will be in conversation with David Epstein (FAN ’16, ’20), a science writer and author of the New York Times bestsellers Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, and The Sports Gene. His forthcoming book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, will be published in May 2026.

This event suitable for youth 12+. It will be recorded and available on FAN’s website and YouTube channel.

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Nicholas Thompson

David Epstein

The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports

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