Whenever I had made attempts to quit drinking in the past, I often found myself stopping short for a variety of reasons. One of the most persistent thoughts was that I was beyond help, that I could never be “cured.” In my mind, I believed that I was such a unique case that no one could truly understand me, nor could I fit into any prescribed course that had been laid out for others. This wasn’t an active thought I held consciously, but it was always there, simmering under the surface. In a way, I saw myself as standing outside of the stream of recovery—untouchable, unreachable. I treated this like it was an unchangeable law of nature, something immovable and set in stone.

What I couldn’t admit to myself back then was that these boundaries weren’t being imposed on me by anything external. I was the one building those walls, and I was the one who needed to tear them down. The idea that I was beyond help wasn’t some objective truth—it was a narrative I was clinging to, whether out of fear, self-doubt, or simply a lack of self-awareness. I think mainly fear, but that will be something to cover later.

I noticed a similar pattern when I first started training for ultramarathons. In the beginning, I just assumed that I could coast by on a half-hearted effort and somehow get the results I wanted. I thought that I could ignore the rules of training and improvement and still succeed, that I could put in minimal effort and achieve maximal outcomes. I approached running the same way I had approached recovery—believing I was somehow outside the rules, that I was an exception.

As I raced more, it became clear that this wasn’t true. My half-hearted effort brought only half-hearted results. Just like with recovery, I began to see that I was the one creating obstacles for myself. I was the one holding myself back by thinking I could bypass the process, by assuming I could take shortcuts and still get to where I wanted to go. It was another reminder that progress, whether in sobriety or in running, doesn’t happen by ignoring the rules or pretending they don’t apply to me. It happens by confronting those self-imposed limits and breaking them down piece by piece.

Both experiences—recovery and running—have shown me that real growth comes not from being outside the stream, but by stepping into it fully and doing the hard work required to move forward.