What’s It Like to Run 500 Miles … On LSD and Mushrooms?

At sunrise, Dante Liberato looks less like an ultra marathoner and more like a man who’s been surviving somewhere deep in the mountains for weeks on cowboy coffee and stubbornness. Salt crusted on his hat, bandana hanging under his beard, and John Lennon shades.  His legs pumping like the wheelset of a locomotive, while his body negotiates the chemical reactions taking place inside his bloodstream. He is the feral counterpunch to today’s runner, counting steps on their watch, while talking on Bluetooth and annoying everyone in their path.

That’s probably why people can’t stop talking about Dante Liberato.

Liberato, a former MMA fighter, is already the most interesting endurance athlete in America, partly because he seems completely uninterested in projecting a polished image. In a sports culture where top athletes treat blood doping like nutritional supplements, then scream from the mountaintops about how “clean” they are. Dante sounds less like a modern athlete and more like somebody Hunter S. Thompson hitchhiked with through the Mojave desert.  Talking about his use of psychedelic mushrooms and LSD feels strangely authentic. And authenticity is interesting today.

And we applaud that.

Recreational running culture is also painful to watch at times. Carbon-plated shoes. Recovery smoothies made with virgin goat milk harvested by moonlight. Men wearing perfectly coordinated outfits for a four-mile “recovery run” before posting heart-rate screenshots as if they just survived the beaches of Normandy in WWII.

Dante Liberato crushing 50 miles per day of mountain trails and open roadside on LSD and mushrooms is refreshingly interesting.

Does Eating Psychedelic Mushrooms Help with Running?

Now we arrive at the strange beauty of the whole thing.

Some runners claim psychedelic mushrooms help unlock a deeper flow state during long-distance running. Others describe microdosing psilocybin before trail runs as reducing anxiety, sharpening focus, and staying mentally present. Science is still trying to understand exactly how psilocybin affects cognition and athletic performance, but the conversation has clearly escaped counter culture.

And maybe it makes a strange kind of sense.

There is an old saying in sports that comfort creates confidence. Baseball players refuse to wash lucky socks during hitting streaks. Fighters walk into arenas wearing the same hoodie for years. Golfers who spent decades playing hungover do not suddenly switch to kale smoothies and meditation before tournament day. The body adapts to familiar chemistry, even when that chemistry sounds questionable to those all-knowing wellness influencers on their couch – nothing maxxing. WTF.

Maybe Dante Liberato simply found his rhythm.

There is also the reality that ultramarathon running borders on hallucination. Somewhere around mile thirty in the mountains, the brain loosens its grip on reality. Trees move strangely. Shadows start breathing. The silence grows louder, and your body starts negotiating directly with a higher spirit.

Psychedelic mushrooms may simply pull that curtain back a little sooner.

Last October, over the course of 11 days, Liberato ran 500 miles from his home in Colorado Springs to Moab, Utah. He reportedly joked about the experience with the kind of dry humor only distance runners seem to possess. “After mile twenty-five,” he once told another runner, “everybody’s on mushrooms whether they took them or not.”

That feels about right.

The Strange Brotherhood of Ultrarunners

The average person sees running as exercise. Ultramarathon runners treat it more like therapy.

These are people running fifty miles through freezing rain while their toenails detach inside $300 trail running shoes. They hallucinate coyotes near aid stations and continue moving forward because stopping somehow feels worse. It is less sport than controlled spiritual demolition, which probably explains why psychedelic conversations keep surfacing throughout trail-running culture.

You hear it in mountain towns all over the American West – Bend, Flagstaff, Park City, Tahoe. Dirtbag runners discuss VO2 max, LSD, mushroom trips, electrolytes, meditation and ketamine in the same coffee shop conversation. Somewhere near the starting line, these races became more of a personal expedition than a competition.

And maybe that is the point.

Too many modern men are starving for intensity. Not entertainment. Not dopamine. Intensity. Something raw enough to cut through the digital fog. Trail running, cold plunges, psychedelic exploration, backpacking, surfing heavy winter swells — all of it feels connected to the same ancient instinct buried beneath mankind.

Dante Liberato simply runs toward that instinct harder than most.

Psychedelic Mushrooms and Athletic Performance

Long-distance runners ranging from Silicon Valley biohackers to engineers and first responders have experimented with microdosing in hopes of improving focus, emotional resilience, and endurance performance. My guess, however, is that many of them were already familiar with psychedelics long before they discovered distance running. Curiosity tends to leave certain doors cracked open.

The science remains unsettled. Culturally, however, something is clearly happening.

More athletes are beginning to question the old factory-model approach to performance, where every problem gets solved with another supplement, stimulant, recovery powder, or surgical doping. Increasingly, athletes are exploring meditation, mental recovery, breathwork, and altered states of consciousness as part of a much larger conversation about human performance.

Somewhere inside that strange landscape sits Dante Liberato, running through the technicolor mountains, while the real athletes argue on Reddit about bro splits and calf implants.

Frankly, one of those lifestyles sounds a hell of a lot more fun.

Final Thoughts: Running on Psychedelic Mushrooms

Maybe the mushrooms help. Maybe the LSD helps. Maybe the real secret is simply escaping the soft, climate-controlled sedation and digital dopamine modern life keeps force-feeding us.

Either way, Dante Liberato serves as a reminder that not all athletes want to become polished motivational speakers selling testosterone boosters on podcasts. Some still want dirt underneath their fingernails. Some still want to push beyond the limits of ordinary experience. Some still want to disappear into a dark place long enough to hear themselves think again. Aaron Rodgers certainly does.

And frankly, that sounds a lot healthier than running to nowhere beneath fluorescent gym lights while watching CNBC on a treadmill.

Thank You For Reading and Supporting The Best Men’s Lifestyle Blog!

 

There is a documentary film being made about Dante’s 500 Mile Run.  They struggled getting funding from sponsors and film houses because of the use of psychedelics so they are self-funding and could use your help.  Get in there! 

 

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