One Lap at a Time. One Day at a Time.

He couldn’t finish a single lap around the track.


That’s where James S. started. Not dramatically, not at a rock bottom with a spotlight on it — just a guy, recently out of Fora Health, standing on the track across from RA, legs giving out before he made it around once. He didn’t know then that he’d run the Portland Marathon. Twice. Same track, same body, a completely different life.

We’ve known James for a while. We kept running into him at Go the Distance events, sat across from him at the FORA Freedom Awards the day before he completed a marathon, watched him keep showing up to the same rooms, the same runs, season after season. There was a conversation that got started at a fundraiser and never got finished — right when James was getting into it, we got cut off and the recording ended. Julie has been thinking about finishing that conversation ever since. This episode is it.

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James spent years using alcohol to get out of his own head and fit in. He was a manager in construction, held it together on the outside, told himself he was functioning. A divorce sent him into a spiral that slowly cost him time with his kids — and then not so slowly. It got worse until one day he called his aunt, told her he needed help, and ended up in detox at Fora Health, then a bed upstairs the following week.

He went through his stay during the COVID years: ice storms that locked them inside the building for days, a COVID outbreak that confined them to their rooms for over a week at a stretch. None of that is the part he dwells on. What he carries from Fora is that they gave him tools to start understanding himself again — and helped him, slowly, start to love himself again after years of letting people take whatever they wanted from him. “I do love myself better than I did yesterday,” he told us. Two and a half years in, he still uses that as his measure. We think that’s exactly right.

Go the Distance gave him somewhere to bring all of that. What he found in that running community — the accountability, the belonging, a sense of purpose that reached past just himself — is something he talks about with a quiet honesty that lands harder than enthusiasm would. He went from one incomplete lap to two marathon finish lines and he’ll be the first to tell you that the only person who was ever going to stop him was himself.

“I have to wake up every day and put my recovery before anything else. Before my job, before anyone.”

— James S.

His boss asked him what recovery is like on a daily basis. That was his answer. It sounds simple right up until you sit with what it actually costs to mean it every morning, before the rest of life gets a vote.

James is an introvert who overthinks everything he wants to say — he’ll tell you that without being asked. He’s still working things out: rebuilding a relationship with his youngest daughter, carrying a quiet dream for a life skills program aimed at people in construction where addiction runs deep and almost no one names it out loud. A version of himself he’s still growing into. He’s not hiding any of it. He just sat down and said it.

Websites Discussed

•      Fora Health Treatment & Recovery

•      Go the Distance (GTD)

•      4D Recovery

•      True Colors Recovery

•      Another Chance Recovery

•      Real Recovery Podcast

Episode Links

Listen: https://mdcr1.com/107

Blog: https://mdcr1.com/107b

That’s the whole thing, right there.

Listen to Episode 107. And if someone in your life is quietly carrying something — send it to them.

P.S.

Want more on Go the Distance? We sat down with founder Izzy Alvarado in Episode 5, and covered the 1st Annual GTD 5K Run/Walk live on the ground. The work they do inside treatment centers is worth knowing about.

#RealRecoveryPodcast #JustKeepShowingUp #RecoveryIsPossible #SobrietyFirst #AddictionRecovery #FitnessInRecovery #GoTheDistance #ForaHealth #PortlandRecovery #RunningInRecovery @RealRecoveryPodcast