Nicholas Thompson

“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

“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