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…
