From Crystal Meth Addiction to 100 Mile Weeks (How to Come Back From Rock Bottom)

TL;DR

Ultra-endurance athlete Andy Glaze explains how surviving meth addiction, institutional trauma, and rock bottom led him to running as emotional healing.

Key Points

• 1.Andy Glaze began using drugs at 13 and was fully addicted to crystal meth by 16. Growing up in Redlands, California near Hell's Angels territory gave him unlimited access to meth smuggled from Mexico; for his 16th birthday, he was given a line of meth as long as his arm.
• 2.His father's cancer diagnosis at 15 accelerated his drug use. With no emotional tools to process potential loss, he turned to meth because it masked depression and made everything feel euphoric and energetic.
• 3.His dad hired off-duty cops to find him after he ran away, leading to a Utah wilderness program. The program hiked a group of withdrawing teens all night with no food — his first involuntary exposure to endurance suffering.
• 4.The wilderness therapist made a pivotal connection Andy had never made himself. For the first time, someone explained he was using drugs to cope with emotional pain — a realization that became the foundation for his later recovery.
• 5.Andy was sent to the John Dewey Academy in Massachusetts, a therapeutic boarding school with abusive elements. Tactics included confrontational group shame sessions, conversion therapy on a gay student, and a headmaster accused of sexual misconduct.
• 6.A Spanish teacher groomed and sexually abused Andy at ages 16–17. He stayed silent out of fear, later felt guilt when the same teacher got pregnant by another student, and only publicly disclosed it in his book decades later.
• 7.Andy stayed sober through high school and college because fear of relapse kept him clean. His father agreed to pay for college only if he remained sober; the institutionalized fear of returning to meth was enough to maintain sobriety.
• 8.His adult rock bottom came after a hit-and-run bike accident, his wife leaving him, and his grandfather's death — all within a compressed period. Smoking weed after the accident triggered the same panic attack he'd had years earlier, and he quit all illicit drugs permanently that day.
• 9.Running began as anxiety management after his friend told him to exercise during a panic attack episode. A community college exercise science class required him to run a mile and a half — his first run since childhood — and he never stopped after that.
• 10.Andy has maintained a 100-mile-per-week running streak for 320 consecutive weeks. He argues recovering addicts gravitate toward ultra-endurance because voluntary suffering offers a safe way to push limits — you can always quit, unlike in addiction or real-life crises.
• 11.Running eventually stopped effectively managing his PTSD from years as a firefighter-paramedic, forcing him into deeper therapy. He is now pursuing CPT and EMDR, recognizing that running masked symptoms rather than healing root trauma, and he speaks publicly to fight the firefighter suicide stigma.