If you want to run a company, run a marathon

A new breed of CEOs don’t just make time to run — they feel running is a cornerstone to success in all areas of life

IT’S 6:45 A.M. and you’re rolling into the office, inhumanely early, to finish up some project or another. As you down your second coffee of the day, you wonder: where is your boss? At home in bed?

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Maybe, but these days the answer might be out on the roads. It’s Threshold Thursday, duh. Boss-person has four-by-ten-minute reps at 10k pace on the training schedule. No time for quarterly reports if you want to go sub-three at Philly next month!

Running has boomed, you might have heard, and although running has long been touted as the every-person sport — all you really need are a pair of runners and a cheap Timex — it’s capturing the imagination of everyone, all the way up to the C-suite, where according to Bloomberg, marathon times have become a fascination of top business executives.

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“Today, there’s running, and then there’s rich people running,” writes Laura Noonan, detailing the lengths the upper crust is going to. “That’s especially true for finance types, for whom running can be a target-driven point of focus.”

One such runner making the rounds with a new book is the CEO of The Atlantic, Nicholas Thompson, who was often better known to colleagues as “the guy who runs to the office.”  Thompson, the author of The Running Ground, is the quintessential example of this phenomenon: a high performing business leader whose main non-work outlet for some time has been running, and who sees it not entirely separate from his identity as a company man.

“It encourages simple habits — healthy sleep, healthy eating, moderate drinking — that help me improve as a father and a business leader just as much as they help me improve as a runner,” he wrote in a recent essay.

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Ask most runners and they’ll give you some version of the spiel that running helps them do all the other things they want, or have, to do. And for the CEOs of the world, there is probably merit to it. A 2023 study presented at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management found there was evidence that marathoner CEOs might be good for their firms. “Our results suggest a positive relationship between marathon CEO and firm strategic persistence,” the researchers wrote. “Moreover, the relationship between marathon CEO and strategic persistence turns stronger when the CEO runs more marathons and when the CEO runs marathons for a longer time.”

And while it may seem preferable to keep running as a non-work-related pursuit, there’s some room for overlap these days, and some job candidates are even including their running pursuits on their résumé — something you might laugh off as a humble brag, but which recruiters and career coaches say can communicate helpful information.

“Sports achievements can be a way to highlight workplace-valued traits, many fitness fans and recruiters say,” reads a report from The Wall Street Journal. “Just don’t get carried away: noting your personal best times can be a little much.” Kieran Delamont