Pushkin. Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions. I'm Mariaknakova and I'm Nate Silver. Today on the show, we have an old friend of mine whom I've known for over a decade, Nick Thompson. So he is currently joining us from the New York City offices of the Atlantic where he is the CEO. So if you hear any background noise, you know this is soho, this is New York. There's stuff going on, and Nick
has a lot of things going on. He is also the editor in chief, former editor in chief of a Wired and wrote a book called The Hawk and the Dove about the Cold War era. It's absolutely phenomenal. You should show out. But to me, he will always be my editor at The New Yorker, which is how I first met Nick. And he wasn't just my editor, he actually ran The New Yorker's website. And now we have him on because he has a new book coming out, I think the most personal book he's ever written, called
The Running Ground. I apologize I only have a galley, but here's the galley. Here's how it looks, and it's about running, it's about his dad, it's a reflection on life, so many different things. Nick, Welcome to Risky Business. Nate and I are so happy to have you here.
Thank you, Maria.
I was actually just trying to figure out when exactly we met by looking at my old emails, but unfortunately it appears this other eight hundred of them that I've just gone through and now we're at nine hundred.
This is this is what editing is like for people who want to behind the scenes look at the editing life. Nick and I have probably over one thousand emails between the two of us over the years.
All right, here we got wait, we got it.
Your new science and technology website, Dear Nick, Emilia Lester told me you're looking to hire someone to head up a new science acknowledge second for the New Yorker's website September twenty eight, twenty twelve. So we are looking at thirteen years and almost a month.
Wow, that is incredible. Well, it's so good to be reunited here. And I've forgot the most important thing of your intro. Since your book is about running, you are the holder of the American record for the fifty k Ultra marathon from men forty to forty five, which is pretty fucking amazing, if I may say so. So I actually want to start not with running, but with your dad. Your relationship with your dad is a major part of the book, and i'd love to hear you talk a
little bit about that. You have your dad, Scott Thompson, who was a runner and who's the one who actually got you introduced to running. And there's this beautiful, you know, very poignant moment of little Nick waiting at the marathon lives to give his dad some new shoes and orange juice, right, orange juice, Yeah, orange juice.
Like orange is kind of on the way out, but like it was super hot for marathoners and I take it too.
So so yeah, i'd love to hear you kind of talk about that intersection and that overlap and you're dad.
Yeah.
So my dad's an amazing guy. And part of the motivation for the book was thinking through his effect on me, thinking through his effect on running, thinking about the way running helped us communicate, and then his life story, which is interesting. All right, So my dad grows up in Oklahoma, He's got kind of a complicated family, doesn't want to be there, partly because of his overbearing Golden gloves boxing champion father.
You know, my dad busts out, like finds.
The school called andover replies, gets a scholarship, like rides horseback delivery newspaper and pays for it.
Right, Great America. That's crazy, by the way, it's pretty cool, right, you know, goes to Endover.
He's like, the kid doesn't fit in, hes got all the wrong clothes whatever makes it work. Goes to Stanford on a scholarship, crushes it, meets John F. Kennedy says, this kid's we president. Goes off it's a Rhodes scholarship. Goes to Oxford, you know, the friends, all the important people in England. Comes back, marries my mother, who comes from a prominent political family. Guy's on fire, right, he's like making plan to run for the Senate. You know,
he's just crushing it. And then like starts to go wrong, like maybe he's not quite as good as everybody thinks, Like maybe he's drinking too much alcohol. And then he's like grappling with this secret that he's realized he's gay, right, and he is sort of new he was gay when he was young, but you know he was closeted. This is nineteen seventies America, it's a pretty hard time to
come out, or nineteen sixties America. And so in nineteen eighty two, when I'm seven years old, he's like made the realization to himself that he's gay.
He leaves, he moves to.
Washington, and he's like, now he's trying to like make up for lost time, right, And so he's in these endless relationships increasingly inappropriate.
He's diagnosed as being HIV positive.
This is during the plague. Turns out it's a false diagnosis, and he has this like very intense trajectory that you know, in some ways the parts that are totally admirable, it is, it's possible, depending on how you count, that he is the first openly gay presidential appointee in American history. Every why works in the United States Information Agency since Shovered by Dog. You know, he's a very rare gay Republican in the
Reagan administration. You know, he is like kind of he like plays a kind of important role in the like late eighties, early nineties, like you know, people should come out so that everybody knows that gay people are everywhere. But then he's like dating kind of like late teenage guys he's maybe met on the Internet or maybe paid for in DuPont circle, and he's like dating like hundreds of people a year, and he's like bringing the like
wrong people to like parties, meeting fulm of people. And then he moves to Asia, maybe for academic research and maybe not. And by the end of his life he's running like a pseudo brothel in Bali. He's bankrupt, he's a tax fugitive, and it's just chaos. Right, So that's my dad, you know, And like when you meet me, you're like, what is your dad?
Do?
You don't really expect that to be the answer. I used to like to catch people up guard, like what are your parents doing? It's like my mom's an artistory and a baps and my dad runs a brothel in Bali and they're like what.
Away?
So like his story and he creates endless chaos in my life, in my sister's lives. But he and I have this like wonderful loving relationship the whole time through and like, you know, he taught me to run. I watch her run this marathon. He like cheers me on as I become a good runner. We run together when we're together, and so running is like part of the spine of our relationship, you know, up until the end.
And then it's it doesn't.
Escape my attention that, you know, when he dies in twenty seventeen, just when I started as the editor Wired, it is like soon after that that I become a much better runner. And there's something about process in his death that also plays a role in my evolution from like pretty good runner to very good runner.
Does your need for it? Well, now I'm psychoanalyzing you go for it? Nate, go for it?
Nate?
Does your need for like or I don't know, I'm presuming in need? Right? Does the discipline that you apply in your running and maybe in other parts of your life? Right? I mean, is that out of a concern that if you aren't disciplined then things could spiral out of control like it did for your dad.
That's definitely part of it.
I mean that that is a very conscious My sister
and I once took this. We were driving together and we were like, we're in this U haul, like moving stuff from his house from one place to another, and we had this conversation where like we both admitted to the other that our biggest fear in life was that like something about our genetic inheritance and having him as a father faded us to become just like crazy chaos agents and unlike until like I do have very much have a sense that if I lose discipline, I faced the
risk of I mean, I'm very like him, Like I kind of look like him, I kind of act like him, right. I I had this crazy experience. It was like two years ago. I'm in this restaurant in San Francisco, and I'm with one of my dad's old friends. He's like roommate from college, and another guy from the Stanford class in nineteen sixty three walks in and so my dining my dining friend goes up to the other guy and goes, Hey, this kid here I'm having lunch with is the son
of one of your old classmates. Who do you think it is? And he looks at me and goes, oh, that's Scottie Thompson's son, right, And you know, knowing that I like fifty percent of my DNA is his. I was raised by him, influenced by him, right, Like he like embedded his ambitions into me.
Yeah, obviously I'm like terrified of going off the rails.
Yeah, I mean you it is. It was very interesting to me that, you know, you did follow in your dad's pustups, even though when you were a kid like that couldn't have been easy. But then you went to andover, you went to Stanford right like you you did all of that that you applied for the roads you did not get it, but that you got everything else. So so I think I think you're I think you're okay, you.
Got and then even that when I didn't, I still like I did what he did without even really knowing, like when he had done he had gotten the roads, and like Ghandak Ghana, what did I do after I graduated from college? Like I didn't really intend this. I ended up in Ghana like he got arrested in Ghana. I got kidnapped in Morocco right like we had like we had like all these similarities.
I was like trying to be like the guy.
You know.
It was very interesting to me. And I think part of why you might be like it could be me right there, but for the grace of God go I is that your dad was brilliant, right, a remarkably smart man.
He and you had his diaries that you went through, and the awareness of what alcoholism did to his father should have stopped it, and he intellectually realized that he should have stopped drinking, and he didn't, and he couldn't, And the fact that he was so smart and also disciplined in a lot of ways and conceptually and intellectually grasped all of this and yet on a purely kind of emotional, day to day life basis, couldn't couldn't follow through.
I think if that were my dad, that would terrify me.
I definitely worry that at some point alcoholism will come for me. And I'm very you know, very careful and very disciplined about that. I'm you know, now almost never drink, so, you know, dealing with the burdens and having observed my father so carefully and having seen these things come to him, And then what you say about the diaries is so interesting because he's so perceptive and smart and there are things he notices.
You know.
My sister and I often joke like she'll walk into a room, right and she'll like, within like ten minutes like be able to like sort of like see into everybody's soul and figure everything out. But she also feelsing so intensely, and I'm like sort of very like resilient, and like more stuff can like hit me. And when I'm like two and she's three, he writes in his diary like everything would be better if we could get Nikki to feel a little more and phil Us to
feel a little less. Right, like these insights into like who become He writes this letter to me when I'm twenty one that I didn't reread until I was like forty nine, as like holy cow, like he saw through my whole twenties and like all the sort of the problems that befell me in my twenties. The guy was utterly brilliant and I wish I had as much of that as he had. And then I want the alcoholism and the you know, the tax evasion, whatever.
Change those were to not not ever hit me.
And it's always a mixed bag, Yeah.
Yeah, parents, Jondren, always a mixed bag. True.
And we'll be back right after this. I want to hear the origin story, as you know I always do about this book. How did you come to wanting to write about something so personal, which is not the type of writing you normally do? It is certainly not the kind of book that your last book was, even though you did have a personal connection to it.
Yeah.
So I had this very strange thing happen in my forties. So I was a very I was a pretty good runner in my twenties and thirties, and when I was thirty years old, I ran a two forty three marathon, which is excellent. I got sick, I got thyroid cancer. It took me two years. I came back, I ran two forty three again. And then for the next twelve or thirteen years, I ran almost exactly the same time I would run Fall Marathon. I'd run two forty three,
which is a very good time. It puts you, like, you know, in.
The local elite.
And then in my mid forties I went much faster and I ran a two twenty nine, which suddenly put me in a whole new category. And so it was interesting, is I was going through this thought process of how did I get so much faster at a time where you're supposed to get slower, and like, as my body is clearly decaying, how did I make this improvement? Because it's not like I didn't train hard in my thirties right. It's not like I didn't focus, it's not like I
didn't read books. It's not like I didn't eat kale right, Like I worked really hard, I just didn't go as fast. And then one day I was running across the Brooklyn Bridge and I had this like mental breakthrough. It's very rare to have, like a I feel like U see ideas common like waves and parts. But it was like literally hit me like a thunderbolt. I was like, oh
my god. I didn't go faster because I didn't realize that I could be faster than I had been before I got sick, like I was psychologically blocked from like going faster than two forty three because that's how fast I had run before I got sick. And then that realization made me realize, well, what makes you go fast it makes you go slow is buried really deep inside of you, and that that is a profound revelation for
all kinds of things in life. And so that that led me to think about my thought role that he played and maybe want to investigate these other runners. But it was this realization that the speed at which one can propel oneself through space is highly dependent on these very deep buried psychological factors made me think there's a book.
Here, so I have. You know, we love data here on risky business and data when you're using when you're making decisions, and that's kind of what you've been talking about. But something that I found really interesting in your book is that some of the decisions you make seem to
be very subjective in a certain way. And what I'm talking about specifically, and this is something that you know, as I think about risk and is something that would be that was kind of scary for me, which is the way that you describe trying to subjectively figure out health wise like am I going to am I about to hurt myself?
Right or not?
Like should I do I want to push through? Or am I about to like cause irreparable damage to you know, one of my muscles, one of my you know, bones, Like am I going to be hypothermic? Like what's going to happen to me? How do you actually calculate? Because to me, like the risk of mortgaging your health and like doing something that's really really scary for your body feels very daunting and I would I would always err on the side of you know what if you think
you're about to be hurt. Stop and you start the book, you know, with your kind of your cancer diagnosis and kind of this really really monumental I think moment in your life where you thought you were going to die and you ended up surviving. So in my mind, if that weren't me, I'd be like wow, Like health is something that's crucially important. And yet right you're you're able
to kind of push yourself through these limits. And it's not like you have a doctor monitoring you by your side being like Okay, Nick, You're okay to keep going. You have to trust yourself and be like Okay, I'm okay to keep going versus no, I need to stop. How how does that work? How does that risk calculus play out in your mind? And then also can we like go broader than running then how does that kind of thinking play out in your day.
To day life?
Super interesting.
So I do have this belief that you want like there's a like a line, right, and it's a very hard line to find, but you go up as close to the line as you can get, and you're making yourself stronger and then you get on the other side and you're making yourself weaker. Right.
And it's a little bit like how hard should you work?
Right?
At like what point does hard work become negative? Right?
Is what time does Maria staying up so late you know, I don't know preparing for this poker tournament, that she'll perform less well, right, or like the amount of there's a point where extra effort has negative returns, right, And the same is true and running where if you because you're basically breaking your body rebuilding your body, and your body rebuilds a little bit stronger, and as you do that, you're able to take on more load, right, And so you run the five k a little bit faster. It
makes you a little bit stronger. You train thirty miles not twenty seven miles. The next week, it makes you a little stronger and more capable of going thirty three. And you're just trying to like get further and further and further, and like, as you increase the exertion, you increase the exertion that you can do the next time.
And so then the question is when do you like crossover? And so.
That comes up in training right where you start to feel right, you start to like, right now, I have like a little something feels a little weird in the top of my right knee. Right. I know it's like coming inflammation, But I have the New York City marathons. You're taking this trade off. It's not soreness, it's injury. And how do I balance that with my training? And
how do you balance that with your goals? And a lot of a lot of what you're trying to do when you train this hard is cultivate awareness about what is your body getting stronger, what is good fatigue, and what is like actual pre injury fatigue. And so that's one element of it, And that's like the only way
you can really tell is cultivating body wardness. That's parably why I don't listen to music when I rung right, because you listen to music and you lose a little bit of that awareness and a little bit of that memory and a little bit of that knowledge. It gets harder in a race, right, because now you're out and you're out in the mountains and something's wrong, right, and so then you have a different calculus. And so this
was the hardest time that's ever happened to me. Was the first time I read my first fifty miler and I go out there and I'm like all psyched to optimize. I've done my whole thing, I've made my split charts, everything's set. And then there's snows, right, and I brought these like shoes that are like great for running on like nice, you know, rocky roads, but are terrible for snow.
Mile thirty two, I slip.
I'm trying to like eat it goo like now something is wrong, right, And so the next five miles I'm trying to calculate am I injured or am I just tired? And it's so hard to tell. And you're cold, you're like near hypothermic. At that point, I remember pulling off into this tent and they're giving me like hot soup, and I'm trying to figure out do I keep forward do I drop out?
I ended up dropping out, And you know, after I dropped out, I was like that, what a whimp?
Like a terrible decision, right like, and then you know, I tried to run a few days after I got back, I was like, God, I'm going to like make up for this, and I was like, oh, something's wrong. I went to a doctor like yeah, you're like inches from ripping your achilles, so.
It's probably the right decision. It's hard stuff.
You don't listen to music? Do you listen to podcasts? Or I love it?
Do you listen to risky Business while you're running? It?
So I do.
When I'm so most of my miles, I'm like running to work, right, I run to the office, I run home from the office, and I'm running like nine minutes a mile, right, Like I'm just jogging down Canal Street, right, And I'm not like, yeah, then I listened to risky Business. I'm listening all kinds of podcasts. I'm listening to audiobooks.
It's great, it's super efficient. But if I'm out and i'm training, so my basically like I'm training three days or four days a week, and I'm just like hobby jagging three or four days a week, right, And when I'm a hobby jagging, I'm listening to podcasts or whatever.
When I'm like training, I'm not. That makes sense?
That makes sense?
Is it safe to assume that, like, once you get to a certain level of performance or aspiration of performance for running, then ninety eight percent of your life has to be not oriented toward that. But like you know, obviously, diet, sleep, booze, drugs other health decisions that you're making. Right, it starts to become fairly comprehensive as far as like daytay decisions you're making. Is that is that fair or is there like a little bit more slack than one might assume?
And is that a good thing or a bad thing?
I think to really really reach your utter potential?
Yes, but I've never done that, like I've gone I've never.
Right, I'm training for the New York Marathon.
It's the Age Group World Championships, right, like I really want to do well. I just like went to Arizona to go run in the Grand Cannon, which is stupid if you're training for a marathon in three weeks and then immediately flew to Italy to go like moderate an event because that's cool too, right, And like you would never do that if you were like really optimizing.
Right.
They optimized a lot, right, but not not ninety nine percent.
So this is actually a really interesting point in your book. So you have there are two coaches that kind of you write about. I mean, you write about more coaches. But so you went to Stanford to run originally, I mean obviously for academics, but also it was a kind of legendary running team that you that you were a part of, and that didn't go quite according to plan. But then I did that you ended up and you can tell the story. That's why I'm not a I'm
not fully I'm not fully it right now. And then you ended up doing this project for Nike where you got hooked up with a coach who changed your life and changed your running trajectory. And they both saw you very differently and had a very different approach to how
running should be optimized for you personally. And I think that's something that we don't talk about enough when we talk about decision making, right, that there's no one size fits all, and that a lot of times you do have to look at the individual variables the individual to make the best decision possible. It's not like a universal best decision, right, It's how do you train this person? So I'd love for you to talk about this contrast.
Yeah, that's a great insight. So I go to Stanford and I ron this guy Vinla Nana is like the most successful best coaching American track history, or like in the conversation, and I'm not the best recruit. I'm tenth recruit, you know, and I'm like, I never even raised for the team, and I'm off the team by the beginning
of my sophomore year. And I interviewed him as part of the search for this book, and one of the things he said to me was like, yeah, I needed kids who were utterly devoted and like they weren't concerned about academic excellence and like really just wanted to be runners. And I like, when I was talking, I was like, okay, yeah, and I never I didn't want that, right, Like I liked running, I liked being good, but it was never the most important thing in my life even then, you know,
I loved all these other things. And so I was I like, I couldn't have succeeded, like in order for him to maybe I had the Maybe I have the innate talent to be a much better runner. And if anybody in the world could have found it might have been Lenana. The guy's a genius. And but I realized talking to him, like I never could have committed enough for him to commit to me to find that talent.
So then when I'm in my forties, get coached by this guy, Steve Finley, who interestingly had like studied under Lenana, and you know, Finley like looks at my own logs and like talks to me and realizes that I could be doing much more and training much harder, and like there are ways to unlock you know, much more speed. But he also realizes that, like I don't care about it that much. Like I love being fast, I care about it a ton, I mean wrote a whole book
about it. Right, clear care a lot about running, but I care about my job much more. I care about my kids much more. And so he made me a schedule, Like you know, these other coaches are like, well, Nick should also do all this like core exercise and like really needs to, like you work on his shoulder mobility. And Steve was like, no, it doesn't right, And you know, he makes the schedule and it would be like Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Sundays would be like run option right, do whatever the
hell you want right. He would make workouts for that were like optimized run a travel, like I wouldn't have to find a track. Like he basically set it up to be like what is the maximum amount that we can get him to improve in the minimum amount of time because there's a cap and if if you force Nick to do more, he'll just stop because he cares what this other stuff more. And so that was like I needed that kind of a coach to bring about that success. And it's a good lesson for coaching anything.
Like you're coaching someone in poker, right, you have to like identify how much time is available, how much mental energy is available, and then structure it for that. But if I was like Maria, you know, like I need you to write four story is a week, right, and you would have been like you could have done it or but you also would have been like, no, Nick, like I have these other things I'm doing. I can
write two stories a week. You know, you have to like figure out how like if you're a writer editor relationship is similar to the runner coach.
Yeah, writing, writing and running in poker all have these weird parallels, right, including I mean I'm running as well as the other two obviously, but they seem to abtract a certain type of obsessive I mean that in a good way, who are walking a tight rope between like
achievement and discipline and have a long term plan. But I don't know, there's something you know when I'm writing something then like I almost feel like running is like part of that work, right, I need time to physically move in like processed thoughts.
I do think there are actually a surprising number of writers who are also like George carl Ohates, like very focused runner. When I was at the New Yorker, like obviously Peter Hesler, who wrote for work round these past marathons, I was like George Packer ran a two forty six marathon, and go Steen, the head of Copy ran like a three ten marathon eighties. Like all of these like New York icons had actually at some point been like hardcore runners.
So how do you okay? You're one of the most kind of ridiculously driven people I've ever met, and I still remember. I think the first time I met you, came to your office, you had your running clothes because you'd run to work. I didn't realize yet that you ran to work every single day at that point. You have already three little kids, or at that point I think you had fewer I had.
I had three kids. I had two kids, but the third one was coming.
Yeah, they multiplied. While I knew you, and you know you you worked with me on a series about sleep a long time ago and about how important it is. And yet you know I'm reading here like you wake up at who knows what time so that you can get all of these different elements of your life in, so that you can get these runs in, you can get these this training in during during the week. So speaking of like that give and take of when does
this effort, you know, become counterproductive? How how do you think about all of that and how do you how do you think about that balance? And it also seems like running actually kind of helps you get that balance, which is which is very which is a funny thing to say, given how much of your time you devote to it.
Yeah, you get like you get a little bit like for every hour you put into running, you get like five minutes back, right, because it helps you fall asleep and helps relax your mind. You know that that series, it was a three part series. Actually it was pretty influential because when you edit a story, you know, you read the sources, you go through stuff. I started sleeping
more after working with you on that. Really, I mean, let me just say that, I actually think people are like, how do you, like, how do you spend so much time running and so much time in your job. There's so many parallels, Like running really hard makes you better at focusing during hard zoom meetings. Right. I would imagine that concentrating during poker makes you a better interviewer because you are better at concentrating, like you are learning like
similar skills. And if your hobbies and passions can reinforce your job, like you're in a good spot.
I mean, just some of the Marshmallow affects stuff too. Maria can tell us whether the Marshallow study is accurate or not. Right, But just like the routine practice of having discipline, right, I mean, it's one of the most basic things that most people are are too willing to sacrifice the long term for the short term in terms
of happiness, right. And that can include like the long term patience, Like you know, every article that I write for my newsletter takes somewhere between four hours and like four days, right, And like having the patience to say I'm going to focus on this and not need a quick hit when there's so many impulses like Twitter, for example, and television, and I'm dating myself with television already, right, But like everything else is such instant gratification where this
seems like this seems like a very different course to choose in life.
Totally, And I feel like one of the things I definitely believe is that discipline is chumutal it. Right, if you make your bed, like you do something disciplined and correct first thing in the morning, that makes it easier to do the next thing discipline and correct ad nauseum. Right, And sometimes you need to let your mind relax and take a break. But like, discipline builds discipline, and so I actually.
Think that.
Running hard, you know, makes it easier to focus and do discipline things through the rest of your day in your life.
Pam, We'll be right back after this break. Can ask a very basic, I guess running question, right, of course, please, how do you pace yourself? Right? Because like I will run you know, five k's not ultra marathons, God forbid, right, and like, you know, I'm not having sure what my goal is necessarily, but it's it's hard to like avoid going out too fast or too slow. And when you're planning twenty six point two miles or what's it's like
thirty one miles, right, ultra marathon? How do you pace yourself? And decide like a what point place do I think I should be running and be how has my body like achieved that pace?
That's so good? All right, So short answer, a long answer, Nate.
We have a whole hour long, long answered, Nick. All right.
So as you get older, you know, one of the advantages of getting older is you have all this data on yourself, right, And so you know how you've run in previous races. You know all the workouts you did before those races, and you know how those workouts you know, project to future races or like I do. And so before I begin a marathon, I have a general sense of how fit I am compared to previous marathons.
So then I make a goal.
So this would be a marathon of fifty k or a fifty miler, and I project out either what I think i'm cap or I project out what is my goal, like I want to break a record, I want to set a world leading time, whatever it is.
And then I work backwards and I make a plan for the race. And so.
The last race I ran and really cared about was the Lake Warmog fifty miler, right, and I wanted to run the American record for my age group, which meant running.
Basically six forties or six thirty eights per mile for fifty miles.
And so I then kind of projected, can I possibly do this based on my workouts, based on what I've done before? Okay, made a plant, and so I made a plan for every mile, like what I would run, what I would plan to run. So then while I'm running, I'm basically I'm measuring three things. I'm measuring my splits. So am I running six thirty eight pace? Or if my plan is to start at six forty five and drop to six thirty two? Am I running the pace that I have planned and projected and think I can
do based on data inputs that I have. That's input number one right, second input what is my heart rate?
Right?
And so heart rate is super important.
If you measure on your wrist, it's a useless indicator because there's too much noise, right, there's bone, your hand moves. You have to measure it on your arm. Everybody screws this up, all the runners do. You got to put it on your chest to your arm right. Once you do that, you get accurate readings on your heart rate. So then you've got a second data signal, and then
that can override. And so if my heart rate is above X and I'm running a certain pace, I know I can't sustain it for fifty miles or twenty six point two. So that's input number two. And then input number three is feel right, and so I know how I should feel at a certain point in a race, and so then that can override heart rate or pace. And so then as you run in an optimal, ideal scenario,
everything is working as planned. So in that like warmog race, I'm running six thirty five, my heart rate is like you know, basically, let's say it's one twenty five in the first twenty miles and I feel nothing right, and if I can sustain that, then I'm in good shit.
Then what happens is as the race progresses.
A you like you lose your brain right, you can no longer think, you can no longer trust yourself right, you start to make bad decisions, and you start to go too quickly or you start to go to slowly.
But the goal is to be able to hold off.
And make good decisions as long as you can about how you pace yourself based on all of those inputs. Also, I should add you have to like look very carefully at the weather, you have to look very carefully at the wind, and you have to think about like are you to be able to run in a group of runners and how does that affect your pace? So that's a kind of complicated answer.
Is that how you do your five k's Nate?
No? No, But what's frustrating is like I've gotten good at like running exactly that distance. Right. The other day my partner and I were trying to run a little bit longer, and like at exactly three point one three miles, right, I hit a wall pretty much right, And so like, yeah, I think you're applying a lot more precision. But let me let me ask what worth is your goal? You'll say you're running a marathon for simplicity's sake. Should you
feel totally wiped out at the end? Is that a proof that you optimally targeted the right amount of effort and pace or do you want to feel still able to walk around and not totally beat up?
You want to feel.
You do want to feel wiped out, but you don't want to feel like you're wiped out until the very last step, because if you, like most people who feel wiped out at the end of a marathon. Push too hard early and so then they've crushed themselves in the last five miles, three miles, ten miles or a death march, and you're gonna run a terrible race. And so feeling wiped out is like necessary but not sufficient for having run your optimal pace. But like your optimal pace is
you actually feel like you. I think of it as you have one hundred pennies in your pocket, right and you're spending them through the race, and the last foot you spend, the last or the last quarter mile you spend the last one. You often will spend all one hundred pennies by mile twenty one, and then it's just hell.
Let me ask a question for people who are not hardcore runners, but maybe more casual runners. What's your favorite place to run in or around New York City.
Well, Prospect Park is amazing, right, I love it. There's also a loop I love to do where you know, I run out to the verizono. You run out on the boardwalk onto the Verizona, you run on the boardwalk in Corney Island, you come back on Ocean Avenue. Obviously, that's a long run for people. But that's cool. I do you think that, like along the Brooklyn Navy Yard is a really good spot. I love the bridges right, Like, we're a lot of wear and tear on your knees
going back and forth across the bridges. But you know, running across like Williamsburg and back on Brooklyn is awesome in the morning before it gets you crowded.
So we have a few more like serious questions. But since Nate asked this, I'm going to give you just a lightning round of very quick questions about running for people who care about that. All right, best time of day to run.
Sunrise?
Okay, oh that's beautiful. I sleep through sunrise.
Mostly surprised me about you, Maria.
Yes, I'm not a morning person at all. Least dependable body.
Part digestive system huh.
Interesting.
The blood flows away and it gets jostled, so you get a lot of stomach upset, which is kind of surprising.
And non runners, Wow, that's yeah, that's very surprising. Pre run rituals.
I stretch, I have a very like legitimate nutrition routine, and then I watch samu Wan Duro winning the Chicago Marathon back in like two thousand. I can't remember what year it was, but like there's this incredible recording samu Won Duro since passed away, but he's racing this guy Kebdet and they're just going back and forth and back and forth.
It looks like Sammy's just like.
Cooked and cooked and cooked and then he just destroys him. And I'm not sure what Chicago Marathon is, but I just always google like one jury cabadet Chicago Marathon and I watch it like an hour before whenever marathon I'm running, and it's great.
I love that. Yeah.
Carbloating, do you carbload one day before a race, two days before a race? How do you work that in?
I don't.
I don't really like focus carbloating where you carb deplete and then eat lots of carbs. I feel like you hurt your immune system more than it's worth it, even if it does help you store carbs a little bit. I eat a sort of high density carbs Thursday races on Sunday, I'll start on Thursday.
I'll be very focused on Friday a little bit on Saturday.
Okay, gels are choose, Jelos, what brand?
I think Morton is pretty good at it, But you want to mix them up because you don't want palate fatigue. You want so you want to like, you don't want to get too used to something because then it'll make you sick. And so A you rotate them and B you try to suck them now without tasting them fascinating.
Yeah, this goes this goes to your to your gut answer as well. Yeah, all right, what's the best rice New York City Marathon? Okay, what about the Northeast Harboro Road Race.
Yeah, it's amazing, but they canceled it. So sad that was it. I love that race so much.
But yeah, the New York t amer you can't beat the marathon, but the Northeast Tarborough Race close second.
All right, and let's let's uh end the lightning round with a very risky business question. And you know, because we talk about being d gens all the time and gambling and all of that, what's the most djeny thing that you've ever done for the sake of running?
And with djen as in like degenerative.
No, oh, Nate, we've got we've got a we've got a djen newbie. Yeah, So when you're when you're a djen, is someone who takes maybe a little bit too much risk that they shouldn't be taking in the moment, makes a bad decision. Someone like, for instance, if you're a poker player, but then you decide to like use part of your buy and to play slots, which you should actually.
Your dad might play slots.
Degen leaning, I don't mean to make anything about sexuality or anything else, but like, yeah, I.
Mean there's definitely a lot of DGEN and sexuality that is true.
That's interesting.
It's like, I mean, you've tried so hard, right, basically, like running a mile too hard to stay with the group is a basic DGEN move that everybody needs. But the most DGEN thing that I've done in a race or just in training either one. I mean, okay, so literally this is good. Last Saturday, I ran the Grand Canyon, right, uh huh. And I was running with like two folks
who with very intense jobs. The group people both like two of them had very intense jobs and also had like to catch flights back to be with their kids, right, And so we had to complete it in a certain amount of time, and a we like didn't really pay attention to signs, which meant we added an extra like thousand feet of climbing and five miles of running and then b we like, we're so focused on getting to the airport that we like, we ran as fast as
we could up the cans, like a twenty seven mile run. And then I was like, guys, you have five minutes to shower and pack, right, And they're like ten minutes, all right, find ten minutes to shower and pack. And so we packed and showered in ten minutes after running the Grand Can and drove like ninety miles an hour, got through the airport, barely made our flights, and it was not great for the people next to us and everything else or our suitcases.
You know, I am the world record holder for age forty to forty nine year old men at the Denver Airport trying to catch a connecting cart. Are you really? Yeah?
That's awesome.
Do you run? Do people run faster mostly when they're inner?
Yes, And that's a super interesting question of why, right, Like what is it about the psychology and physiology of being in a race? But it is totally different, and you're able to reach a mental space and extract like a percentage of maximum effort that is much higher than at any other point.
There's a beautiful moment in your book when you talk about this when you try to run a marathon yourself in Prospect Park and it's much tougher than when you actually have.
It's like there's a magic of being out there and having people cheer you on. But of course it also creates this dgen risk where you can like go too fast because you're trying to like appeal to the crowd, and then you cook yourself. But it's very different like running by yourself, running with one person, running with a group, running a race, you run totally different speeds.
What's your goal for this marathon this year?
Nick, It's this is the weirdest build up I've ever had. So I've had two little injuries, I've had this weird thing that happened last week. But I would love to be able to run two forty three thirty seven, which would be one second faster than I ran in two thousand and seven, which is when I ran thirteen seconds faster then when I got sick.
All right, Well, that is a very good goal, and I think a really lovely note on which to end this, even though we could go on forever, but.
So much fun.
You guys.
It's so interesting because you have such interesting ways into this from your like poker thinking writing backgrounds.
This we should go on for hours.
But unfortunately you have a magazine to run. Nick, thank you so much for joining us once again. The book is the running ground. It is wonderful. You guys should all buy a copy, and Nick, you should return to editing and be my editor again. Thank you.
You should send me another nine hundred page story memo. Thank you so much for having me on. Maria, thank you, Nate.
Let us know what you think of the show. Reach out to us at Risky Business at pushkin dot FM. Risky Business is hosted by me Maria Kanakova.
And by me Nate Silver. The show was a cool production of Pushing Industries and iHeartMedia. This episode was produced by Isaa Carter. Our associate producer is Sonya gerwit Lydia Jean Ka and Daphne Chen are our editors, and our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein. Mixing by Sarah Bruger.
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