Am I a dry drunk?

That question comes around more often than I’d like to admit—usually somewhere between a long run and a long stare at the wall after. I’ve done the AA thing. Worked the steps. Gave it up to my Higher Power, more times than I can count. And yet, here I am, years later, still wondering if I fit that fickle, uncomfortable category: a dry drunk.

If you’re reading this and don’t know the term, “dry drunk” is pretty inside baseball in the recovery world. It refers to someone who’s quit drinking but hasn’t really changed—the person who’s sober in body but still soaked in the same old thinking. The anger, the obsessiveness, the control. The constant need for more—just without the bottle this time.

And, yeah… I can see pieces of that in myself.

Running has become my drug of choice. Or, to be fair, ultra running—because if you’re going to replace addiction, you might as well do it with something equally absurd. It’s socially acceptable self-destruction. Endorsed, even. There’s a medal at the end. A banana. Maybe a cowbell.

I rearrange my life for it. Every bit of it. Training schedules dictate sleep, diet, social plans, and my general emotional stability. I’ll skip a family event if it conflicts with a long run. I’ve turned down work opportunities for races that don’t even give out t-shirts. I tell myself it’s discipline, but sometimes it feels a lot like obsession with better branding.

The ultra world, in a strange way, normalizes this behavior. If you wake up at 4 a.m. to run 20 miles in the dark, people call you dedicated. If you do it with a hangover, they call you troubled. But functionally? It’s the same compulsion—just a cleaner one. You can destroy yourself with miles and call it wellness. You can chase suffering and call it spiritual growth.

And I get it. Because it works. Running gives me what drinking used to give me: structure, relief, escape, identity. It’s the thing I pour myself into when life feels too big to hold. But there’s a thin line between healing through something and hiding in it. And I walk that line all the time.

Here’s the hard part: running has saved me. It’s shown me the best parts of myself—resilience, patience, grit, discipline. But it’s also given me a hiding place. A socially approved way to keep the motor running at full throttle so I never have to stop long enough to feel the old stuff. The stillness. The silence. The fear.

And maybe that’s where the “dry drunk” part sneaks back in—not in the miles, but in what the miles protect me from. Sobriety, at its best, asks for stillness. For presence. For discomfort. Running gives me motion, purpose, a distraction that’s both beautiful and exhausting. I don’t drink anymore, but sometimes I’m still running from the same ghosts.

But here’s the thing—and maybe this is what saves me now: I see it. I know the trap. I can name it. I can tell when I’m chasing peace and when I’m chasing punishment. And sometimes, that awareness is enough to shift the direction, even slightly. Enough to remind myself that it’s okay to rest. To skip a run. To not earn my existence through exertion.

Maybe I am a dry drunk, in some ways. But maybe that’s okay, too. Maybe that’s just part of the evolution—turning vices into tools, and learning to hold them with a little more awareness, a little more care, each time.

I still use running to heal. But I’m learning, slowly, to let it teach me, too. How to slow down. How to breathe. How to stay.

Because sobriety, like an ultramarathon, isn’t about perfection—it’s about coming back, again and again, even when you don’t have all the answers. Especially then.