Deez Interviews: Catching up with Nicholas Thompson on his running commute (figuratively, obvi)
Happy Friday, Deezers! This week’s interview is appropriately speedy because it’s with Nicholas Thompson and all about his running, mostly. That’s it, that’s the whole intro.
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The interviewee: Nicholas Thompson (follow him @nxthompson!)
The gig: editor-in-chief @ WIRED
In a recent piece from Outside Magazine, it was revealed that you run to and from your office in New York (a 9-mile round trip) almost every day. When and why did you start doing this??
I started 12 years ago! I decided that biking to work was too dangerous, and taking the subway to work is inefficient for me.
What do you do during your run? Do you think about work? Listen to podcasts?
I usually listen to podcasts or audiobooks. I love a16z, Sleepwalkers, Revisionist History, The Daily, Gadget Lab, Longform, and the New Yorker Radio Hour. Though, sometimes I turn them off and try to just clear my head.
Running and writing have sort of notoriously gone hand-in-hand as dual passions for many writers/journalists. As the editor-in-chief at WIRED and a longtime marathoner, do you see these two passions as complementary, or each as a sort of "escape" from the other?
I think they are complementary in ways. I work every night, after I run home and spend time with my kids, and I think that the process of running allows me the energy to work the late evenings. Plus, there are all kinds of great tech podcasts I only listen to while running.
I imagine that there's a metaphor waiting to be made out of the fact that you bridge the distance between your home and the office on foot, while also managing WIRED's main office in SF and having to bridge that distance from so far away. What's that like?
Lol. I hadn’t thought about that. There is indeed a lot of travel, but I love to travel.
Finally, what's one achievement from your running career you're the most proud of?
I’m thrilled that I was able to run my marathon PR of 2:34 this spring in Boston at age 43, an age when I worried I’d be slowing down.
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Don’t forget to follow @nxthompson on Twitter! But also, if you like to keep up with his running, he Instagrams it a lot more here. And have a lovely long weekend!