To Run My Best Marathon at Age 44, I Had to Outrun My Past
After 20 years of long-distance competition, I ran my fastest. All it
took was tech, training, and a new understanding of my life.
RUNNING IS THE simplest of sports: right foot, left foot, right foot.
But the simplicity opens up complexity. There's no ball to focus on, no
mat to land on, no one charging toward you with their shoulder down. And
so your attention shifts inward. As you run, you're just you—right foot
and left foot, nature and nurture, whatever goes on in your mind.
My relationship to the sport begins in Bacone, Oklahoma, in the
mid-1940s. My father, Scott Thompson, grew up there as the shy, misfit
son of a domineering Baptist minister. Frank Thompson, or Granddad, was
an imposing oak of a man with eyebrows the size of muskrats. He was a
Golden Gloves boxing champion and wanted his only son to obsess about
sports, but my father was uncoordinated and athletically indifferent. He
wanted to read books and listen to The Marriage of Figaro. Eventually,
my dad escaped his unhappy home for boarding school in Andover,
Massachusetts. He applied in secret, paying the application fees with
money he earned on his paper route. He did well there and won a
scholarship to Stanford and a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. His
friends from that time remember him as a flurry of energy, wit, and
charisma. After meeting my father on campus in 1960, John F. Kennedy was
quoted in The Saturday Evening Post that Scotty Thompson might make it
to the White House before he did. After he completed his studies, my
father married my mother and began an adult life of constant motion,
ambition, and enthusiasm. He barely slept; he began publishing books and
became a tenured professor; he made plans to run for office. But he also
started drinking too much, smoking too much, going out too much. By the
time he was closing in on 40—an age, he would often say, when all men's
lives fall apart—he needed some discipline in the fermented mayhem of
his days. As he would later tell me, running was the rare sport where
you mostly competed against yourself. You could learn without having to
lose. It was also something he hadn't failed at in front of his father.
In 1980, when my dad started putting on his running shoes, I was 5, and
naturally, I wanted to tag along. I remember him driving his car around
the block where we lived just outside of Boston with his eye on the
odometer. Start at the front door by the boxwoods, turn left and left
again. Go two full loops around the block; on the third, stop at the
gate in the fence just past the beech tree. That's 1 mile. I remember
the triumph of running the whole thing by his side. He was obsessed with
his physical appearance, and he would teach me to do push-ups in the
backyard and sit-ups with a round metal weight he kept under the bed. He
began to race too. On my bedroom wall I have a photo from around that
time of him running a 5-mile road race in Maine. He's wearing a red
Lacoste polo shirt and socks that could stretch to his knees but are
squished down at his ankles.
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Muddled Intelligence Hampered Response to Capitol Riot
New details about what authorities anticipated on Jan. 6 highlight
failures to grasp the degree of the threat from pro-Trump right-wing
extremists.
On Jan. 4, the intelligence division of the United States Capitol Police
issued a report listing all the groups known to be descending on the
city and planning to rally for President Donald J. Trump two days later,
such as the Prime Time Patriots, the MAGA Marchers and Stop the Steal.
The dispatch, a kind of threat matrix, gave low odds that any of the
groups might break laws or incite violence, labeling the chances as
“improbable,” “highly improbable” or “remote.” But the document, which
was not previously disclosed, never addressed the odds of something else
happening: that the groups might join together in a combustible mix,
leading to an explosion of violence.
But just a day earlier the same office had presented a slightly more
ominous picture. The Capitol Police’s intelligence division, which draws
on information from the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security,
warned of desperation about “the last opportunity to overturn the
results of the presidential election” and the potential for significant
danger to law enforcement and the public. The documents show how the
police and federal law enforcement agencies produced inconsistent and
sometimes conflicting assessments of the threat from American citizens
marching on the Capitol as Mr. Trump sought to hold on to power. That
lack of clarity in turn helps explain why the government did not bring
more urgency to security preparations for a worst-case outcome. But the
decision in the face of muddled intelligence to take only limited
measures to bolster security and prepare backup highlights another
issue: whether, as some critics have long said, agencies that have spent
two decades and billions of dollars reacting aggressively to
intelligence about the potential for Islamic terrorism are similarly
focused on the full array of threats from the homegrown far right.
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