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If you've spent any time scrolling through running social media, you've probably seen him. The smiling ultrarunner. The one logging 100 miles a week for over 320 weeks straight. The viral "come run 100 miles with me" videos. The relentless positivity.
But the smile is not the story.
The story is the 13-year-old kid in Redlands doing crystal meth pulled from a Hells Angels supply. The Utah wilderness program at 16. The boarding school in a Berkshire castle, where he was groomed by a teacher he never reported. The slow fade back into using as a high-functioning adult.
And then the cascade that broke everything open: a hit-and-run, a wife leaving, a grandfather's funeral.
Andy Glaze is an ultrarunner, firefighter paramedic, battalion chief, and the author of Smile, Or You're Doing It Wrong: A Journey from Rock Bottom to Redemption. What makes this conversation resonate is his refusal to flatten any of it, including the recent humbling of realizing that running, his medicine for so long, has stopped quieting the PTSD the way it used to.
The magic, as he puts it, lives in the space between "I can't" and "I did."
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