Ten years ago, when I turned 40, my father posted a birthday message on my Facebook page that was visible to all of my friends and followers. I had a great life, he said: a loving wife, three beautiful children, a successful career. But all men’s lives fall apart at this age, he warned. He was 73 then, and was thinking of his own life and of his father’s. There is too much pressure and there are too many temptations, he said. He had entered a spiral at 40 from which he never recovered. He hoped the same would not happen to me.

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I read the post, puzzled. It was a private note in a very public place. I responded with humor and deflection, but it made me realize something. My father’s old friends always said that I remind them of him. I had spent much of my life trying to be like him: going to the same schools, traveling to the same places, taking up the same hobbies, forever seeking his approval. But I also desperately wanted not to be like him. I didn’t want my discipline to drop. I didn’t want my id to overcome my superego. I didn’t want my life to fall apart at 40.

Running seemed like it might be the key. Running had helped him hold things together until middle age. Then he had stopped. I had run with him for years, and I was still competing in marathons. I was going to keep on running, and I was going to keep doing it well.

People often told me that my father was unlike anyone they’d ever known. He’d grown up in Oklahoma and escaped an unhappy home by winning a scholarship at Phillips Academy Andover, another at Stanford, and then a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. When he met John F. Kennedy in 1960, Kennedy joked that my father might make it to the White House before he did.

For all of his early promise, though, professional success didn’t come easily. He entered academia while dreaming of politics, but didn’t find satisfaction in the former or success in the latter. By the time I was born, in 1975, he was drinking too much, smoking too much, and worrying too much. Then he started to run. The great running boom of the 1970s had inspired him, and the sport offered discipline and structure to his ever more fermented days. When I was about 5, he’d head out in the mornings, and I liked to tag along when he would let me. Running a full mile made me feel as though I’d done something real. I remember proudly placing my tiny sneakers next to his by the front door of our house in suburban Boston. When I picture him now, I see him as he was then, strong and smiling, and running.

By the late 1970s, my father had earned a name as a young public intellectual and Cold War hawk. He won a White House fellowship and, for the next few years, traveled around the country for television appearances and debates. In one memorable exchange, he was debating arms control. His interlocutor declared that my father stood only for the Republican Party but that she stood for all of humanity. That may be true, my father responded, “but at least I have been delegated for my representation.”

Even as his professional stature rose, he battled alcoholism and gradually came to the realization that he was gay. He started a relationship with a 25-year-old male chemical engineer from MIT, and then one day he was gone, off to Washington, D.C. He got a job under President Ronald Reagan and started running even more, hoping to calm the chaos of his life. He ran every morning, alternating runs of 12 miles and six miles. When I visited him at his new home in Dupont Circle, he would head out on a run before I woke up and return, covered in sweat, just as I was making my way down his dusty, half-renovated stairway with its broken banister.

In 1982, he entered the New York City Marathon and headed to the start in Staten Island, where he sat and listened to Vivaldi’s Orlando Furioso on his Walkman. It was, he would later write, appropriate that he was listening to an opera about “a stirring figure driven mad by the world’s demands.” I was 7, and I came to watch him. I stood just past the Queensboro Bridge, where I handed my father a bottle of orange juice and a new pair of shoes. He finished in a hair over three hours. It was the fastest marathon he would ever run.

My father’s life in Washington was manic and confused, and he was entering a period of record-setting promiscuity and little sleep. He once told me that a person has the ability to resist the first affair in a relationship, but once the dam is broken, the waters flood out. The difference between zero and one affair is large; the difference between one and 100, he explained, is small. He began to date a string of inappropriate men, including a kleptomaniac who stole art from high-end auction houses, tried to poison my dog, and ran over my older sister’s cat.