When we’re in our 20s, enthusiastic social drinking might fit seamlessly alongside fitness routines, jobs, and other obligations. A couple of decades later, the same approach to alcohol might tank our functioning.

That’s because as we age, we process alcohol less efficiently. “Some are surprised by it and find they feel intoxicated by the same amount of alcohol they used to drink [without a problem],” says Pick. But as we get older, we have less muscle mass and body water, she explains, which affects alcohol processing.

The liver’s capacity to break down alcohol decreases with time. Think of a bathtub. When the drain is open, the tub empties easily. As we move on in years, the liver’s drain tends to slow down. “One hypothesis is there’s less blood flow to the liver as we age,” says Haas. “If blood is flowing to the liver at a lower rate, then that drain is also slower.”

There’s also the simple fact that the longer we live, the greater our exposure to various toxins — and the greater their cumulative burden on the liver.

“The more you’re hanging on to those toxins, the more the drain is clogged and metabolism is slowed down,” cautions Haas. “It’s important for everyone to cultivate a detox-­supportive diet and lifestyle, and keeping alcohol consumption moderate is important for that. The less effectively those detox pathways function, the more likely we are to experience ­disease as we age.”

Regularly eating large amounts of sugar, particularly added sugar, can trigger cellular inflammation, which can lead to a range of health issues, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, candida overgrowth, and autoimmune disorders. Because sugar activates the brain’s reward center, causing it to release dopamine and beta-endorphins, it can be more addictive than other foods.

People with naturally lower levels of beta-endorphins get a bigger rush from sweets, too, notes Kathleen DesMaisons, PhD, author of Potatoes Not Prozac: Simple Solutions for Sugar Addiction. The subsequent rush–crash cycle can also spark mood dysregulation and fatigue.           

Start by limiting the usual sugar suspects — think desserts, sodas, cereals. Then watch for other items that sneak sugar among their ingredients: ketchup, spaghetti sauce, barbecue sauce, fat-free yogurt. (For packaged food, find label-reading tips here.)

When in doubt, focus on consuming more whole foods so you don’t need to stress about the labels. Though whole foods such as fruit contain naturally occurring sugar, they also offer fiber, which reduces the impact on your blood sugar (but be wary of processed fruit juice, which lacks stabilizing fiber). If a sugar craving hits, reach for a glass of water and a snack with protein, healthy fat, and fiber.

Find strategies to tame a sweet tooth in the articles below.

More on Cutting Sugar

The morning I was arrested in 2010, I was lying in bed with my dog, Ollie, whom I’d just adopted from a rescue shelter. I was 26 years old, an addict living in Hollywood, when federal marshals knocked at my door.

At the time, I was strung out, a heroin junkie who’d been struggling to get clean for four years. But addiction presented a challenge that my ­willpower alone could not overcome.

Meanwhile, my history of dealing had caught up with me — my arrest was related to drugs I’d sold years before in Maine.

It was later the morning of my ­arrest, as I was sitting handcuffed ­inside of an unmarked cruiser headed to a federal holding facility, that I felt my past collide with my (then-unknown) future. I had two distinct thoughts:

My life is over.

Thank God, at least that life is over.

If I could go back and talk to my 26-year-old self that day, I’d say, It’s all going to be OK. Even though I may not have listened or believed it then, I would try to convince myself that this was the best thing that could happen to me. It was the wake-up call I needed.

Escape

I grew up in Belfast, Maine, during the late 1990s and early 2000s, when aggressive promotion and increased prescribing of OxyContin triggered the opioid epidemic. Maine was one of the first places where the crisis took root, and drugs were commonplace when I was in high school.

Though I grew up in a loving home, generations of family trauma ­preceded me. Both of my parents’ families strug­gled with alcoholism and domestic dysfunction. This may have contributed to my own susceptibility to addiction.

Ever since I was a young adult, I’ve been drawn to experiences that allow me to escape the background noise in my head. As a child, you’re fully present and the world is magical — filled with possibility. Every experience is new and exciting; you can’t help but be fully immersed in the moment.

As you grow up, you start constructing your “self” and understanding your place in the world. You become aware of how the world perceives you: Other people, pressures, and responsibilities influence who you are and who you want to be. You start to experience fear and anxiety.

From early on, I sought spiritual outlets that helped me check out from all of that. I found that sports — particularly running and swimming — allowed me to be present in my body and experience each moment without fear and anxiety. Movement was comfort, and I became an accomplished high school athlete.

When I got older, I found that drugs also provided an escape, only they acted more quickly — no work required. Over time, I took advantage of this easy escape more often. I began selling drugs because it allowed me to continue using drugs.

My substance use during high school began to interfere with my athletic performance. I gave up running because it was hard to be a good miler when I was smoking every day. That was the first thing I loved that I sacrificed to addiction.

Sobering Experiences

As I progressed to harder drugs during my years at Wheaton College in ­Massachusetts, I continued to sell drugs to support my habit. For a while, I was a functioning addict; I kept up with my daily life even while I was using. I even continued to swim.

Yet my addiction progressed, and I ultimately failed my junior year for academic reasons, which is when things became dark. This was the lowest point of my journey. Previously, I’d been able to balance sports, school, and my addiction, but failing junior year was when I recognized that I was no longer in control of my life.

I made my first attempt at sobriety and managed to return to school. I stopped selling drugs, got a job, and finished college. After graduating, I moved to California, where I cycled in and out of addiction. Although I tried many times to get sober, I found that I was powerless to make any sustainable changes in my life.

That is, until I was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison for conspiracy to distribute cocaine. ­Before my trial, I realized that it was now or never: The time had come for me to get sober, and I was finally ready.

In prison, movement became a critical component of my recovery. Exercise had always been an activity I could turn to when I needed solace and confidence. This was especially crucial during the early days of my sobriety — I needed something I could count on, a reason to believe in myself again.

Also, my experience with endurance sports as a young athlete had taught me the value of structure, routine, consistency, and hard work. In prison, I learned I could apply these principles to other areas of my life, including my recovery.

Sober inmates were another great resource. They helped me learn how to ask for and seek out help. I still use this type of support system today.

From Training to Coaching

I was released from prison on January 28, 2014, and took a 62-hour bus ride to Portland, Maine, where I began to ­rebuild my life. At that point, I didn’t know what I wanted to do or what direction my life would take. I just knew I needed to do something to keep myself busy.

Because movement and exercise had become so important to me and my recovery, participating in endurance events seemed like a good place to start. The mystique and extreme nature of Ironman contests pulled me toward triathlon training.

I showed up day after day for training; I found comfort in consistency and routine. I researched what the world’s best athletes were doing and ­incorporated some of their ideas into my training.

Simultaneously, however, I was careful not to give 110 percent during any session — I didn’t want to lose myself ever again. I’d become better at recognizing when I needed to back off.

Once I started competing, I won a handful of Ironman 70.3s and was eventually ranked No. 1 in my age group in the United States and among the top 10 in the world. It felt great to be recognized, but I understood that internal joy doesn’t come from winning a race — that was all external. So, I was careful to avoid defining myself by my achievements.

In 2016, a job opportunity came up at a local fitness facility. It involved teaching cycling classes for triathletes in an interactive studio. I gave it a shot and realized I really enjoyed sharing my knowledge as part of a community of like-minded individuals. But it wasn’t until I met Matt Dixon of Purple Patch Fitness later that year that I had a true introduction to coaching.

Through Purple Patch, I started working with a wide range of athletes. Eventually, I became the head of programming and spent my days managing a team of coaches, writing programming for numerous products, and coaching individual athletes.

This type of work gave me a sense of purpose and aligned with what I was doing in recovery. After being so focused on myself and my addiction, it felt good supporting others as a coach in addition to participating in my local recovery community. I began to see how small actions in my life contributed to others’ successes, which helped build my sense of self-worth. Slowly, I started to redeem the self-esteem I had sold during my years of addiction.

Stepping Away

I began to reconsider my own role as a competitor in 2019. I still loved ­triathlons, but I realized I had unresolved issues with my self-worth and self-esteem, and I began to wonder whether I was using triathlons as another form of escape. I also noticed other similar patterns between my drive in sports and my addiction.

I asked myself how much of my motivation to compete stemmed from a desire to serve my ego and seek escape. And when I couldn’t answer that question, it really struck me. I could lose myself to endurance sports just as I’d lost myself to drugs.

Further, my priorities had shifted: I was now married, with a child on the way. I needed to conserve my time and energy for other areas of my life.

Endurance sports can be a healthy spiritual pursuit; I know they once were for me. Initially, training and competing helped me rediscover my needs, such as structure, consistency, and routine. They were invaluable tools supporting my journey of self-discovery and recovery. Maybe some­day they will be again.

But I needed to step away from competitions. I needed to replace my ego with humility and think less about myself.

Knowing movement and exercise will always be important to me, I took the leap to focus on a new pur­suit: After the 2019 World Champion­ships, I sold all my equipment, left Purple Patch, and started my own coaching company.

Cultivating Presence and Peace

If endurance sports have taught me anything, it’s that it’s more about the journey — the pursuit of something hard and meaningful and the result­ing lessons — than the outcome. For so long, I tried to numb my experience of this journey with drugs and endurance sports, but escape is no longer my goal. These days, it’s all about cultivating presence, contentment, and peace with my son, who was born in July 2020; with my relationships; with my family.

Today, I’m divorced, but my dog, Ollie (who stayed with my parents for the three years I was gone), still sleeps with me, and I take him for walks around my apartment complex in Louisville, Colo. The rest of the day, I’m coaching, spending time with my son, working out, attending recovery meetings, and reading.

Sometimes I reflect on how far I’ve come. It’s like I’ve lived two lives, the second of which started on the morning federal marshals arrived at my door. Though I couldn’t have known it then, that experience was the first step toward the life I’m living now — a life I want to live to the fullest.

Matthew’s Top 3 Success Strategies

1. Create a routine. “Great is the enemy of good. Perfection is a myth and consistency wins over time — every time,” Matthew says. “One of my favorite quotes is ‘Only the disciplined are free.’ Structure provides that freedom.”
2. Envision your “buckets” of life. For Matthew, these buckets are fitness, nutrition, spirituality, fun, family, and service.
3. Embrace adversity. “How we deal with or face challenges is what defines our struggle as meaningful and having purpose or value,” Matthew says. (See “How Adversity Can Lead to Personal Growth.”

Tell Us Your Story! Have a transformational healthy-living tale of your own? Share it with us!

This article originally appeared as “Arrest & Recover” in the June 2023 issue of Experience Life.

Explore the The 5 Pillars of Sobriety:

1. Movement  |  2. Balance  |  3. Connection  |  4. Process  |  5. Growth

Many of us default to alcohol as a way to manage emotions. If we’re stressed, struggling to decompress after work, fighting with our partner, or just celebrating, relaxing, or socializing, we often keep alcohol close at hand.

From time to time, we may also ask ourselves, “Am I drinking too much?” Perhaps we noticed our drinking increase during the pandemic in response to boredom, loneliness, or the absence of the usual guardrails.

Maybe we question whether those nightly two glasses of wine are good for us, even as social media is ablaze with hashtags affirming that #momneedswine. (These messages disguise the fact that most mothers really need more human support.)

As a sobriety coach and educator, I believe questions such as “Is my drinking that bad?” are the wrong ones. They lead us to compare ourselves favorably with people who routinely drink to excess. They imply that if we’re making it to our jobs, fulfilling our social obligations, and keeping the kids alive, then drinking must not be a problem.

In my experience, a more useful query is this: “Does my drinking make sense for me?” This offers up more to think about. It keeps the focus on alcohol’s effect on your life, today, which is different from anyone else’s.

When our drinking no longer makes sense, we tend to do four things:

(1) We drink too much;
(2) we think about drinking;
(3) we think about not drinking; and
(4) we recover from drinking — which is to say, we nurse our hangovers.

These four things burn up a lot of time and energy. When they do, it’s fair to ask whether we’re getting a good return on our investment with alcohol. Do we really want to put this much life energy into something that offers such poor returns? If not, it may be time to change course.

When drinking no longer makes sense, it may be because of alcoholism. Alcoholism is a manifestation of the disease of addiction, and it can be deadly.

The approach I’m suggesting here can be useful whether you’re pursuing sobriety (the term I use when some-one has quit drinking because of addiction and also wishes to work on the deeper emotional issues that led to problematic drinking) or you’re simply choosing to be alcohol-free (a newer term for people who have recognized that they feel healthier when they don’t drink and they want to socialize without alcohol).

Regardless of which term pertains to you, if you decide to start living your life without alcohol, these five pillars can help you make change that lasts.

The 5 Pillars of Sobriety

I stopped drinking more than 22 years ago. At the time, I would have told you I was having lots of fun when I drank — but I wasn’t. I struggled with depression and anxiety, and I used alcohol to cope. It never occurred to me that I didn’t have to drink. I thought everyone drank, and my job was to find a way to manage it more effectively.

When it became clear how much alcohol worsened my anxiety, I quit — reluctantly. I was 27 years old, and I believed I would never have fun again. I thought my life was over.

How wrong I was.

Today, after many years of experience working as a psychotherapist and sober coach, I can honestly say that I never look back. I live joyously in the land of sobriety.

But in working with others, I have seen that stopping drinking by itself isn’t usually enough to create a sustainably sober life. We all do much better when we follow a program to fill the gaps that used to be occupied by alcohol.

I developed the five pillars of sobriety to support that transition — and then help make sobriety a lasting experience. Embarking on this path is about more than avoiding alcohol: It’s about finding new and more sustainable ways to take care of yourself and to live your fullest life.

1. Movement

When we pursue sobriety, movement helps enormously. In fact, I require all my clients to adopt some form of regular exercise.

Movement fills time in a positive way, improves our energy levels, and connects us to others in a healthy fashion. Meeting at the health club for a workout or on some trails for a walk is a terrific way to bond, and it usually leaves us happier than most happy hours.

Movement also supports sobriety on a biochemical level. As Judith Grisel, PhD, notes in her book, Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction, alcohol can act like a “neurological sledgehammer,” interfering with the brain’s chemical balance.

Making time for movement is also an act of self-worth.

Exercise helps stimulate the production of dopamine, serotonin, and other feel-good neurochemicals, helping to restore balance in our brains and moods.

Making time for movement is also an act of self-worth. It means we devote regular time to activities that make us feel better, with no punishment later. A Friday-night yoga class instead of drinks after work. A Monday-morning workout that sets us up for the week. A sober Saturday night with friends, followed by waking up Sunday morning with the energy to exercise. This is the essence of treating ourselves kindly.

You might choose long walks, kettlebell training, long-distance bike rides, short HIIT workouts — how you move doesn’t really matter. What’s important is finding activities that bring you joy, which is the best motivator.

That said, exercising with other people does check a lot of boxes. We can’t fake our fitness with others. We are where we are, which requires an honesty and vulnerability that can lead to deeper, more authentic connections.

2. Balance

Alcohol interferes with our physiological and psychological balance. Drinking can depress the central nervous system and dysregulate mood. It can mess up our body chemistry and make us crave sugar and salt.

We’re also out of balance when we spend hours ruminating about what we said or did the night before, or whether we should have a drink tonight. This energy could be better spent elsewhere.

One of the best tools for cultivating balance is the acronym HALT, which stands for “hungry, angry, lonely, tired” — four common alarm bells that need immediate attention.

Alcohol interferes with our physio­logical and psychological balance.

When we’re drinking a lot, we may reach for alcohol or head to the bar to satisfy (or silence) these feelings. When we stop drinking, our needs remain the same, but the solutions are different.

Hungry. Sobriety involves learning to listen to our bodies. That means when it’s telling us to eat, we eat. Remind yourself that when intense feelings arise while you’re hungry — impatience, anger, and frustration — they usually disappear once you’ve eaten. Carry some healthy snacks with you so you can always take care of yourself.

Angry. We may feel entitled to a drink when we feel mistreated or resentful. But when we drink to drown out our angry feelings, we don’t learn the vital skills of healthy conflict or how to set proper emotional boundaries.

It’s important to learn to recognize your anger, take some deep breaths, and then figure out what’s going on beneath the feeling, so you can choose your response.

Lonely. Loneliness often causes my clients to stumble; they think alcohol is necessary to sociability. It’s not.

When you recognize that you’re lonely, create a plan to connect. Make a list of all the people you can contact, then call, text, or email someone. Sobriety groups can be particularly helpful in the early stages, as you don’t have to pretend everything is OK. (For more on the loneliness epidemic and how to connect, visit “Why Social Bonds Are So Important for Our Health“.)

Tired. Sleep is critical to maintaining balance. When you’re tired, rest. You can also focus on where and how you spend your energy, so you don’t burn yourself out. Give yourself permission to chill and leave tasks half-done when your energy is low. Observe where your energy gets drained. Change what you can.

3. Connection

Alcohol is sold to us as a vehicle to quick connection. When we drink, we feel like we belong, and belonging is a powerful need. Although lots of people can enjoy alcohol appropriately and use it to enjoy social occasions, it is not necessary for connecting.

For some of us, alcohol can work against it. That’s because the connections we create when we’re drinking may feel more profound than they really are. Alcohol loosens our inhibitions, and what feels like a reasonable thing to say or share after a few drinks ends up producing regret the next day.

Then we may stew in shame and self-loathing about our oversharing, which leads us to feel embarrassed and afraid to face people. At that point, we end up avoiding others and cutting ourselves off from the connection we still truly need.

Alcohol can confuse the messages our bodies send; sobriety allows us to hear them clearly.

We need authentic connection, the kind that helps us feel truly seen and known. If we’re lonely, creating artificial connections through drinking won’t help us satisfy that need. Vulnerability is about being real. This means showing up as the fullest version of ourselves that we can muster, which we can’t do when we’re drunk.

Meaningful connections with others happen when we are connected to ourselves, which requires us to listen to our bodies and emotions. Alcohol can confuse the messages our bodies send; sobriety allows us to hear them clearly.

4. Process

We are always engaged in different processes: aging, learning a new skill, becoming a new parent, getting a divorce. When one process ends, another begins. These are the building blocks of our human growth.

At the same time, our past behavior patterns are almost guaranteed to show up during transitions in life. If we felt abandoned as children, we may feel abandoned whenever we’re challenged to grow. If our ability to trust others was damaged, or if we were expected to care for everyone else first, we may continue to do those things unconsciously throughout our life.

Until we recognize and reflect on a pattern that was formed in childhood, we’re likely to repeat it whenever we try something new or challenging. Recognizing and reflecting on our patterns is how we develop self-awareness.

But alcohol interferes with self-awareness. It can keep us stuck in patterns, because it prevents us from seeing and knowing ourselves at a deeper level.

To help my sobriety clients move beyond this impasse, I recommend a process called uncover, discover, discard. It helps us develop the self-knowledge we need to escape our limiting beliefs.

Uncover involves revealing behaviors, patterns, and responses that are embedded in the unconscious mind. This helps us identify harmful core beliefs, such as the idea that other people cannot be trusted — or that they will always leave us, no matter what we do.

The next stage is to discover what this behavior, pattern, or response means, where it originates, why we have felt this way, and why we might have avoided examining it. While we may have been hurt by someone breaking our trust in the past, we may discover that it wasn’t personal, and that the other person’s choices had more to do with them than with us.

Our imperfection can be messy, but it also leads to freedom.

At this stage we can also validate how hurt we were and treat ourselves tenderly, acknowledging the pain but not letting it define us. As we recognize that we did not cause our hurtful experience, we may accept that we can’t control people.

We can, however, become more discerning about whom we trust, take small risks, and give people chances.

Then we discard. We let go of the past programming that no longer serves us. In this process, we commit to giving people the benefit of the doubt, to setting boundaries, and to using discernment. We may decide to trust people until they give us a reason not to. If they do, we can refuse to take that behavior personally.

This is how we change our faulty belief systems about ourselves. This is how we stop our limiting beliefs, which were born in the past, from shaping our lives in the present.

Finally, the goal of process work is not perfection but self-acceptance. Am I brilliant at all things? Of course not! I am an average cook, for example, but I am good enough, and that’s all I really need to be.

Moving out of our limiting ways of thinking about ourselves is about accepting our humanness. Our imperfection can be messy, but it also leads to freedom.

5. Growth

We will always be called to grow, as people, as parents, as partners, and in our work and other relationships, even as we feel resistance.

Change is hard: We like the familiar, yet we are not called to be comfortable all the time. Growth is messy, and often frustrating, but pursuing it is worthy of our time and energy.

Alcohol can interfere with our call to growth by distracting and numbing us. When we default to alcohol to manage our emotions, we don’t develop the skills we need to navigate life successfully. We also miss the opportunity to learn vital lessons that will help us become deeper, braver versions of ourselves.

For example, we might fear that we don’t know where we’re headed, and we’d prefer to stay where we are rather than face the unknown. But change will happen no matter how hard we resist it. The mistakes we make along the path are glorious growth opportunities.

There is no such thing as failure — only feedback.

There is no such thing as failure — only feedback. Focus on the feedback, especially if it’s uncomfortable, because within it are the tools we need to get to the next place.

When I stopped drinking, at 27, all I wanted was some peace, a job, and a place to live. This was the sum of my ambition. Yet now I am teaching, coaching, and helping others, because I couldn’t ignore the call to grow. I know it’s calling you, too.

Sobriety offers us more energy and space to think our thoughts and feel our feelings. Imagine what you might do with those resources. What have you been longing to do or try? Are there places you’ve wanted to visit? Experiences you’ve wanted to sample but never had enough energy?

We have a finite amount of time here on Earth, and I am quite sure none of us was born to spend that time fighting a hangover and ruminating on what happened last night.

Remember that none of the pillars of sustainable sobriety needs to be accomplished perfectly. “Good enough” will get us where we need to go.

This article originally appeared as “Sustainable Sobriety” in the October 2022 issue of Experience Life.

While lacing my shoes on a winter day south of Portland, Ore., I considered the challenge ahead. I’d recently agreed to join some coworkers to run the annual Hood to Coast Relay, an exhausting, overnight, 199-mile race, and I was just starting my training.

Outside, I noticed the cool air in my lungs as I took my first steps — just a light jog to start. I knew nothing about training for long distances, and I didn’t want to take things too fast.

I could feel my body protesting, yet I didn’t stop. Instead, my mind wandered to my children. I thought about giving birth to my son a few months before, in September 2015; my daughter was almost 3. For a long time, I hadn’t been happy with myself or my choices. I’d had gestational diabetes when I was pregnant, and I was going through a divorce.

I thought about my son’s birth, which had reminded me that physical, emotional, and spiritual health are everything. As a mother, I wanted to be a good role model.

I reflected on my pride in our Southern Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Pawnee ­ancestry and how I could share that with my children. We honor our ancestors, including Chief Kias from the Southern Cheyenne Tribe and those killed at the Sand Creek Massacre, by wearing our regalia at powwows and speaking our language proudly.

As I rounded the final corner of my first training run, my lungs and leg muscles burned, yet I was overcome by a sense of mental clarity and peace. I slowed my pace and realized that my recent decision to move with my children to my parents’ house, though difficult, had been worth it.

Somehow, suddenly, I knew running was worth it, too.

Expanding the Circle

During that rainy winter, I ran with my kids strapped into an unwieldy double jogging stroller on the weekends. The experience was the perfect preparation for uneven terrain.

It was the most committed I’d ever been to running. For years I’d been a basketball player and occasional runner, but already this had become about more than training for a relay. When I ran, I was relieved from the stress of my mediation and divorce process. I could feel truly at peace with myself and my thoughts.

Then, as winter gave way to spring, running became spiritual. In late April 2016, I flew to Oklahoma to comfort relatives after my dear aunt ­Athamah died when a drug- and alcohol-­impaired driver smashed into her car.

My visit coincided with a 5K race to commemorate the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. I ran beside my cousin and his wife, with my then-7-month-old son in a jogging stroller. I thought and prayed about my aunt, which helped me mourn and grieve for my loss. Gratitude for the memories we’d made flooded me as I ran.

Finishing the race, I realized that running had become my medicine. I dedicated the rest of the year’s training to my aunt and began focusing on what kind of runner I wanted to be.

Recentering

In the late summer heat, I felt my beloved aunt’s presence as I ran my relay legs from the top of Mount Hood to the Pacific with Team HANDS (Healthy Active Natives Doing Something). At the time, I was deep in grief. My people mourn for a full year, during which we cut our hair, don’t partake in powwows, and don’t wear our regalia. The race felt like a culmination of my emotional struggle over the past months: As I worked through the tough miles in foggy darkness, I was also working through my grief.

During my third and last leg, my feet were covered with blisters, but I felt powerful. When I finished, I was crying so hard that bystand­ers worried I was injured. After months of training and emotional pain, I had become a runner — an Indigenous runner.

One night the following spring, I was playing on a coed basketball team and dribbling down the court when I stopped and pivoted, tearing my anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and partially tearing my medial collateral ligament (MCL). Surgery and rehab eclipsed my regular training runs.

As the seasons changed from hot to cold to hot again and again, I waited — not so patiently — for my body to heal.

When I returned to running in 2018, I ran a steady lineup of races. I could feel my relations — past and present — cheering for me on each run, supporting the growth of my mind, body, and spirit. I was so strong by the following summer that I ran my first-ever half-marathon.

Always looking for an edge, I decided at Christmas to stop drinking alcohol for four months. I hoped this would improve my performance in my next half-marathon, slated for late April, right before my 38th birthday. I planned to celebrate with drinks.

Completing the Circle

As the year closed and a new one was born, I realized I was on another journey — toward an alcohol-free life. After attending a 12-step meeting to educate myself while teaching drug-and-alcohol awareness classes, I had a spiritual awakening:

My Creator showed me the person I was when I drank, and I didn’t like what I saw. Plus, I realized that to be a great runner, I had to jettison the mindset of going cold turkey before races and celebrating with drinks afterward.

During the pandemic, I ran virtual races by myself, even though many runners abandoned their training regimens. What kept me going was the philosophy of the Seven Generations: Each day my choices make the world better for the next seven generations. It all starts with me — maintaining healthy habits, aligning my behavior with my values, honoring my culture — and then it passes to my kids and their children and the next generation and the next.

Nowadays, I seek food that supports my body and my goals. I’ve been alcohol-free since December 27, 2019, and I start each day with a run, regardless of weather or season.

What I love most now is jogging short distances with my kids. I’m so proud when I see them next to me with smiles on their faces, celebrating their strength. In those moments, I’m overwhelmed by the power of living a healthy life connected with my ancestors, my future generations, my spirituality, my culture, and my self.

Birdie’s Top 3 Success Strategies

1. Lean on your supporters. “My family helps me reach my running goals by watching my kids on weekends while I do long runs,” Birdie says. “They also volunteer for events I’m competing in.”
2. Exercise outdoors for physical and mental well-being. “I love listening to the birds and being one with Mother Nature,” notes Birdie, who also recommends variety. “Going to a new park or hiking area keeps my running fresh.”
3. Reward yourself during training and after you’re done. A massage or special dinner are good ways to celebrate your effort. When Birdie is tapering before a race, she loves having her kids join her. “They’re at an age where they can jog with me for about three miles — and doing it as a family encourages us all.”

Tell Us Your Story! Have a transformational healthy-living tale of your own? Share it with us!

This article originally appeared as “Running for a Healthier Future” in the June 2022 issue of Experience Life.