Why I Run

Ten years ago, when I turned 40, my father posted a birthday message on my Facebook page that was visible to all of my friends and followers.

- By Nicholas Thompson

The author and his father at his house in Washington, D.C., around 1994

I had a great life, he said: a loving wife, three beautiful children, a successful career. But all men's lives fall apart at this age, he warned. He was 73 then, and was thinking of his own life and of his father's. There is too much pressure and there are too many temptations, he said. He had entered a spiral at 40 from which he never recovered. He hoped the same would not happen to me.

I read the post, puzzled. It was a private note in a very public place. I responded with humor and deflection, but it made me realize something. My father's old friends always said that I remind them of him. I had spent much of my life trying to be like him: going to the same schools, traveling to the same places, taking up the same hobbies, forever seeking his approval. But I also desperately wanted not to be like him. I didn't want my discipline to drop. I didn't want my id to overcome my superego. I didn't want my life to fall apart at 40.

Running seemed like it might be the key. Running had helped him hold things together until middle age. Then he had stopped. I had run with him for years, and I was still competing in marathons. I was going to keep on running, and I was going to keep doing it well.

PEOPLE OFTEN TOLD me that my father was unlike anyone they'd ever known. He'd grown up in Oklahoma and escaped an unhappy home by winning a scholarship at Phillips Academy Andover, another at Stanford, and then a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. When he met John F. Kennedy in 1960, Kennedy joked that my father might make it to the White House before he did.