Downloaded from YTS.MX
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
We understand that a plane
has crashed into the World Trade Center.
We don't know anything more than that.
I remember seeing
an arm and a leg fly through the air.
I mean, there was piles of meat.
- One of the most serious crises
facing people in this country, overdoses.
They're now the number one killer
of people under the age of 50.
That epicenter is Ohio,
where officials say that they are
on track for 10,000 overdose deaths this year.
We, as a society, tend
to view people with substance use disorders as criminals.
It's easy to do that until it hits our families.
You raise children
in a good household in a middle-class family,
and I don't think any parent ever says,
"Oh, okay, I'm prepared for my son to be a heroin addict."
Nobody's ever prepared for that.
The drug is their survival.
If we feel threatened,
if our safety, if our life is threatened,
we're gonna do things we wouldn't do otherwise.
- Miles, where are my other pair of shoes?
- I was- - Towards the end, right?
- Ya miles, that forth miles- - Porter's gap?
- Yeah. - Porter's gap.
- 68? - Yep.
Because yeah, if you got blisters,
you want to change shoes or the other ones don't feel right.
I put it at Porter's gap.
- 18 months ago, I was
looking at spending 15 years in prison.
I was addicted to shooting heroin.
I was jobless, I'd been kicked out of the military.
I was depressed.
I had anxiety disorder, panic disorder,
nightmares, couldn't sleep.
I had basically given up on life.
And tomorrow I'm about
to attempt to run a 100 mile trail race in Alabama.
- This race is a tough one.
I think there's 16,000 feet of climb.
I've never ran 100 miles
so there's a 30 hour cutoff.
I'm pretty sure I'll be good by making at least the cutoff.
- Shawn's biggest problem
is he doesn't know when to back off.
You can't just go balls out the whole damn race.
You have to stop, take care of yourself.
- It's surreal to think about where I was two years ago.
I want to finish, I just want to go back home
and look at my family and tell them I did it.
I'm addicted to feeling good.
And one of the things that makes me feel good now
in life is seeing my family be proud of me again.
'Cause it was a long time since that's happened.
You know, seeing my little sister.
Seeing my mom, my stepdad, any of my family,
look at me and tell me they're proud of me.
There's no other feeling, in the world like it.
I'd have to be damn near broken and on my deathbed
and for them to come pull me off of the course.
Shawn, how old are you?
- Four.
Now how many candles are on there?
Count 'em.
- One, two, three, four, five.
How old will you be on your birthday?
- Five. - Very good.
- Mischievous.
You know, Shawn was mischievous.
That would be a good way to describe him.
And he was a fun kid.
He loved to be outside.
He loves sports.
His nickname is B-ball.
Shawn will be in a driveway, basketball, playing basketball.
That was his passion.
- My grandma and my mom would always say
that we're gonna go watch Shawn play b-ball.
- But always playing outside.
"I want to play with the b-ball,
I want to play with b-ball."
B-ball just kind
of stuck, and I still call them that to this day.
- My little sister was born and, I don't know,
all of a sudden I had just gotten
this sense of being a protector.
And she was just like my little baby sister.
- A typical Saturday morning
would be my mom sending me up to wake him up.
He was a teenager at the time, so he loved to sleep all day.
- And so I'd tell Kelly like,
"Kell, go get B-ball up, go get him up."
And I'd send her up the stairs and I'd hear her go back.
And then all of a sudden
I would just hear her screaming at the top of her lungs.
- And she would send me up
to his room and he would always pull me
in under the covers and try to cuddle with me.
- He would grab a hold
of her and he get her under the covers in a bear hug,
and she would just scream.
I would just scream bloody murder.
- Then I would have to scream.
"Stop it," you know, "Stop it, you two."
- Looking back,
it's one of my favorite memories of him and I.
I always viewed him as a superhero.
I knew that I was always safe
with him and I just thought it was the coolest thing
to hang out with my older brother.
I never thought he could really do anything wrong.
Come on, Shawn!
All right!
I remember comin' down, we'd sit around.
Some of the parents watch 'em all play all day and leave.
He never got in any trouble or anything.
Good kids, just innocent fun back then, you know?
- Being a stepparent is, you know, it's a thankless job.
I never met a better dude in my life, man.
I mean, the whole dealing with somebody else's kid
and stuff like that.
But there was years where I was too young
to understand the sacrifices he was making.
For what I put my family through,
for him to stick by my mom and, you know,
still be in my corner, he showed me the bar that, you know,
what a real man needs to live up to.
- Youngstown is, it's one of those interesting cities
where it was the old steel mills.
And when the steel mills were booming,
Youngstown was booming and everything was great.
And when the steel mills went away,
Youngstown started to really go downhill very fast.
- No jobs, no money.
They turned to drugs stealing, robbin',
kids comin' out of high school
that don't want to go to college.
Tell you what does amaze me, though,
how a small, little town
could have that big of a problem with drugs.
But no town's safe, can tell you that.
- I was a junior in high school
and I remember grabbing my bag.
I remember putting a tie on that morning
'cause it was the day of a game,
and I left my house and was on my way to school.
You know, it was early in the morning.
Next thing I knew,
I woke up in the hospital and all messed up.
- Ran into a tree.
Had his jaw wired shut for six weeks,
was on morphine and a lot of pain relief medication.
- Like any kid you dream
of being an NBA, or something like that.
And that was just the first time
in my life where a dream had kind of been shattered.
With my jaw being wired shut, you know,
I wasn't a part of the team
and they went on to win the state championship.
When I lost basketball, I was like trying, you know,
as a kid trying to discover like, who am I?
Okay, tell everybody where we are.
- We're in Texas.
Where?
- We are in San Antonio. - No, we were there,
now we're in Wichita Falls.
- Now we're in Wichita Falls.
Why are we here?
- Because my brother's graduating
and we're very proud of him.
- Oh, how nice.
All right.
Sheppard Air Force Base.
Here we come.
Tech School graduation.
Follow behind them.
She's following behind you.
One of the proudest moments was
when he graduated from the Air Force Reserves.
And I was like, "Wow, this is great.
You know, this is amazing."
- This is my jacket.
All right, hang on a second I got to get situated.
- My patches, where I'm from, my job.
Warrior patch during the war.
All right.
- Shawn's first apartment,
right above the orange poppy flower gift shop.
The door on the left.
Never forget that.
So proud of him to get a place on his own.
And that's where the drugs started, right up there.
- He got out of the Air Force.
And that's kinda when I noticed he just wasn't
the same person that I grew up with, I guess.
And it just kind of got worse from that point on.
- I had moved from five different states,
and everywhere I went, I'd keep it together
for a little bit and then things will fall apart.
I knew I needed to do something, like with my life.
And so I tried getting back into the Air Force,
at the time they weren't accepting any prior service.
And so I started looking
into the Army and I joined the Army.
- We take things in life for granted so often.
And then you see what happens, you know,
everything's going well.
And then boom, all of a sudden,
and it's not all of a sudden, I'm sure it was very gradual.
And all of a sudden my son's a heroin addict
and I just wake up every morning
and go, "How did this happen?
How did this happen?"
Morning! - Morning, 183.
30 seconds down.
- Running this 100 miles, there's, you know,
it's kind of like a badge of honor I can wear
for the rest of my life.
I want that sense of accomplishment.
It's giving me the hunger, it's giving me the drive back
in life that I haven't had for a long time.
I mean, it's just,
it sounds so crazy when you think about,
oh my gosh, this is like four marathons
and you're gonna do it without stopping?
And I can't even fathom it,
but I think he wants to do this to prove a point
to us, to his family, maybe to himself, as much as anything,
that I did this, you know, I've got this, I can do this.
Kind of solidifies in his mind,
and I think he thinks
it helps solidify to us that he's made it.
- It feels good.
Pretty confident, pretty optimistic.
I haven't had any trouble yet.
Nice and cool shade.
Can't complain.
See what happens.
What's up, brah?
Oh, it's potatoes.
Grabbing shit, I don't know what to grab.
I don't know why I wouldn't put a long sleeve shirt.
- But it is nice out. - It is.
- And I don't know what to take right now.
My brain shut off.
I got nervous when I fell that I was gonna get up
and be hurt, and then I've seen numerous people out there
dying on the trail, so.
There was a time where my whole family,
other than my mom, had turned their back on me.
They wouldn't speak to me, and rightfully so.
You know, there is no doubt
in my mind, my older sister's had
to deal with the direct effects
of my actions and the stress I put on my parents.
She's been a little harder
to get back, you know, get back in my life.
I just want to start being her brother again, man.
I just want to be in her life.
- I know he's ready for it.
I'm just not ready for it yet.
- Sun's going down.
And I'm trying to make up as much ground
as I can before it's all the way dark, you know,
stuff starts slowing down considerably
at night, especially with how technical this is getting.
Went over to Iraq,
we were part of a QRF team where if there was down vehicles
that had gotten hit by an IED,
we would go out and recover those vehicles.
- I really hoped that him going back
into the military was the answer.
- He went to bootcamp, went into the Army, went overseas
into Iraq and that's when all the bad stuff happened again.
- I had gotten hurt training
for Iraq, went and saw the doctor and they
gave me a big bottle of painkillers
and shot me up with some cortisone.
And it was time to get back out there
and get ready to go back for Iraq.
And when I had started taking those pills,
it just had, you know, opened the monster,
it sparked that allergy
in me, and to the point where, you know,
there was no given 'em up.
- To me, it seems like the military
feeds the painkillers to them like candy.
That's a monster to just come right back to 'em.
- When he went to Iraq and
then after, I pretty much woke up almost on a daily basis
wondering if we were gonna get that phone call
that he had gotten killed by a roadside bomb,
or they found them OD'd somewhere.
- I prayed every day that, you know,
he was gonna come home safe, and he did.
But you know, there's a lot of things that don't show
when you talk to a person
until you talk to them a little about,
like, he says, "Mom," he says,
"You know, you have to obey a direct order
from your sergeant."
I said, "Yeah, I know that."
And he said, "But do you understand what it was like
when that order was to go out
of the vehicle that they were in and pick up the body parts
of people that had been your friends?"
I just said, "Oh my God, I had no idea, no idea."
None.
- You're just trying to mask the pain
and get through the day.
And I just didn't know what to do.
I found my way to deal with it with the painkillers.
I ended up failin' a piss test for the military.
And so they had started the paperwork to get me put out.
And so once again, I was isolated.
Trying to fill this void,
all of a sudden, you know, that's...
Trying to fill this void.
I never woke up saying like,
"Oh, I'm gonna shoot heroin,"
but the first time you're sick and you're on withdrawals,
and all of a sudden you don't have this pill
and this is the most uncomfortable, restless,
worst feeling you've ever felt in your entire life.
And you know just this little bit
of medicine will just make it go away, you'll do it.
It's dark as hell.
Very rocky, very technical, a lot of roots.
For sure.
They're not completely gone already.
I know I'm losing my both big toenails completely, for sure.
You know, my goal is, ultimate goal is to finish.
That'd be killing it.
- So there was this kind of two people, you know,
there was the one that we knew,
and there was this other one, this drug addicted one.
- When I was shooting heroin, it was like,
it was just total body euphoria.
It was the best, warmest blanket,
just being wrapped around you.
And for a couple minutes, you just,
you felt like you were in heaven.
And then it would go away,
and it was the hunt to get that same feeling back.
It becomes a love affair with the needle, too.
And then, so those couple of minutes, I just,
I remember sitting there thinking like,
"Oh my God, I love this.
Like, this is the best feeling ever."
But then, you know, it's counterbalanced
by the sickness and all that stuff that comes thereafter.
- I knew once he got on that wasn't him anymore.
That was the monster.
- You didn't know if he would pick up the phone
and be the B-ball that I knew,
or if he would pick up the phone and just,
you could just tell that he was different sometime.
- There was always a glimpse of Shawn.
You know, there was always the glimpse of him in there.
- Doing heroin and everything became
so normal to me that, like, as normal as it is
for anybody to wake up and brush their teeth
in the morning, it was that normal
for me to wake up and stick a needle into my arm.
It was just what I did.
So then once you get that into your body, all right,
how am I gonna get money today?
Who am I gonna manipulate out
of giving me money to get high today?
- It was always a lot of lies,
I'm sure many of them I didn't realize until, you know,
years down the road.
"Mom, I got, you know, got in a little fender bender.
I'm here on the side of the road.
The guy says just give them a couple hundred bucks
and we won't turn in the insurance."
And what did I do?
You know, I sent the couple of hundred bucks.
The hardest part as a parent, is where do you draw the line?
That's the hardest,
the absolute hardest thing to determine as a parent.
Whether what you're doing is just prolonging the inevitable,
or whether what you're doing is keeping them alive
long enough for them to figure it out on their own.
- The first time I OD'd, I remember I shot up right in front
of this Shell, like sitting in front of the main door.
And the next thing I knew, I was waking up in an ambulance.
They had just shot me with Narcan.
And when I had opened my eyes,
I just remember asking him, "What happened?"
And I thought there was like a SWAT team
outside of the ambulance waiting to arrest me, and all that.
And as soon as I got to the hospital,
I left against doctor's orders.
I went back to get all the dope we had stashed,
and got high again.
- When I didn't hear from him,
I would say, "Okay, am I planning a funeral?
Is that what I need to do next?"
That's just so difficult.
And I did that so many times
in my head and I didn't hear from him for days at a time.
And then I finally would and I'd be so happy.
You know, he's alive.
You know, really that's kind of all I can ask for right now.
- You don't know how bad it hurts for me
thinking about I have to plan his funeral and that...
that's tough
to see her go through that.
Sorry.
- You know, the hardest thing
for me was when somebody said, "How's Shawn doing?"
How did they want me to answer?
He's a heroin addict. How do you think he's doing?
We have water, Gatorade.
Got snack foods around here,
we got hot food down there.
Grilled cheese, quesadillas, pizza, bacon.
- This is a bacon, chicken, cheese quesadilla,
and these are just cheese.
Or chicken noodle soup, hot chicken noodle soup.
- Let me get a chicken noodle soup.
I'm running down there to get,
it's out in the middle of nowhere.
- Good luck, man!
- Good luck, be safe!
- Thank you! - Thank you, guys.
Good luck, guys.
And my father sent me a text, told me,
you know, don't go out here, hurt myself.
I don't have anything to prove.
I understand what he means,
but I do have something to prove, man.
So many years I took the easy way out, made excuses,
cut corners, all that shit.
When I cross that line and they hang that buckle,
because I earned that shit.
My lower back's bothering me a little bit.
What happened to your hand, dude?
- Huh?
- What happened to your hand? - Oh, I don't even know.
My back's fucking killing me.
You're taking it with you?
Yeah, bro.
Give it to you at the next one.
- The calls were the hardest part.
"You have a collect call from McLennan County Jail."
"You have a collect call from Waco County Jail."
"You have a collect call from Youngstown County Jail."
You know?
You just go, okay, here we go again.
Thought maybe this time would be different.
- I come home on leave,
I knew it was her birthday was coming up.
And so I purposely took leave
with the idea that I was gonna come home
and then I was gonna be able
to do something for her, for her birthday.
- So many of my memories
of this town and him are just when he was using.
And so like every place I go, there's a memory.
- And as soon as we pulled out, drug task force pulled up
and like, I'm talking guys hanging off
the side of a black Tahoe and guns drawn.
And like, before I could even put together
what was going on,
they were like on the windows, guns drawn,
you know, "Hands up," all that stuff.
I had the dope in my wallet sitting on my lap.
And I just remember like,
"Oh, this is happening on my mother's birthday."
- He was supposed to meet my husband and I for dinner
the night of my birthday, and he never showed up.
I'm like, "That's not my Shawn.
My Shawn wouldn't do that."
And four o'clock in the morning got a phone call from here.
And this was where he was.
And I had to get him out of jail.
- We're driving down the road
and all I could think was I was like,
"Man, I want a cigarette, I want a cigarette so bad."
And she's like crying, she's got tears in her eyes.
And you know, addiction is a very selfish thing.
So I was only worried about, you know, me at the moment.
And so we pulled into McDonald's
and parked in the parking lot.
And I just looked at her and I was like,
"Mom, what are we doing?"
And she looked over at me and she was like,
"I figured you were hungry."
And I just, my heart sank to my feet.
And I was just like, man, like only a mother's love,
could I ruin her birthday, humiliate her
in front of the family, ruined my entire trip home,
and her first thought when I get out of jail
after being busted for heroin possession was, you know,
I need to get him some food.
- It's hard.
It's hard to know your child's in someplace like this.
It's hard to understand how the whole thing
spirals this far out of control.
And this wasn't the only the jail that I visited him in.
- Once I started getting locked up, it just kept happening.
And then I got popped for heroin possession
two times here in Texas.
And they gave me two years in prison.
I did my time there and it was, I mean,
it's just all 24 hours a day,
you're just on alert and watching your back.
And it's so much, it's just a different world.
You get your own brand of PTSD from prison.
And so of course I do drugs.
Of course, I would surround myself
around a bunch of other people
that felt like they were less than too.
Just because you feel outcasted from society.
And that's all in your own head,
it's not like, you know what I mean,
you don't have "I've been in jail" written on your forehead.
You feel like everybody knows.
Yeah, when I pass the 62 miles,
this is the farthest I've ever been.
Fucking frustrating it's going so slow.
How's your pace?
- Trash.
I'm dead, man.
- What hurts? - Everything.
My back's fucking killing me.
Bonking out, no motivation.
You got to deal with life on life's terms.
I thought long and hard when I was away
in prison, that, is there a God?
You know, if there is a God, does he have a plan for me?
Is there something bigger than me out here
that's steering the ship?
And so what's my purpose on this earth?
- There is a time, I don't think he was home
for a couple years, at least.
That's where the questions from the family, you know,
"Where's Shawn?" you know, "How's Shawn?"
We used to try to be the parents where, you know,
"Everything's fine, everything's fine."
And you're just telling a lie, enabling everything.
- I would go months without hearing
from him to find out that he had been in prison.
There were many times
he just, he came home and my mom would be telling me
for weeks at a time, "Oh, he's doing so well."
We'd pick him up at the airport and he would be dressed
with his ass hanging out of his pants, smoking.
And my mom would just be so sad.
You could just see the color drain
from her face as soon as we pulled up,
'cause she just knew nothing had changed.
- It took its toll on everybody.
- How many times do you pay for rehab?
How many times do you send money?
Or how many times do you just eventually say no?
- So we come to an agreement that, you know,
he would not come home until he was clean.
So there's a lot riding on this.
There ain't no way in hell that I'm coming home after this
and saying I didn't finish and didn't get my buckle.
I'd have to be on my death bed,
dragging myself across that fucking line for me to stop.
It's not an option.
I felt like each mile that I ticked off
was putting me that farther from addiction.
So I felt like if I could finish that,
you know what I mean, that I could put that monster to rest.
The drugs are the demon
and that demon might come try to come back
and grab him, and he just has to kind of push him aside
and keep running.
I mean, this is his big rescue
life jacket right now.
It is, running is,
what he says and admits, is saving him.
So if it was to go away, it'd be tough.
Yeah, that's him, that's him.
- Bro, I got to drop, man.
I don't...
Dude, I'm in too much fucking pain.
I'm sorry, I don't know what else to tell you.
My back is fucking killing me.
I'll show you the bag I've taken.
Bro, I don't know what to do, man, I can't.
I've always carried around the guilt
of my best friend Corey passing away
because I introduced him to the drugs
that eventually took his life.
You know, I'll always carry around that guilt.
You know, I love him,
he was the best friend I ever had.
My brother from the military, his name was Corey Taylor,
but everybody in the military has a nickname,
like I was Liv for Livingston,
his just happened to be Y.
We had gotten so tight,
we just decided to go get a tats one day,
so you got my brother's keeper, you know what I mean?
Saying no matter what, we'll always have each other's back.
If that statement were true, I would have never...
You know, I was just getting high
with my friend, I didn't realize that I was, you know,
giving him something that was gonna kill him or something
'cause it was so normal to me.
So I had started using heroin
and Corey was my best friend, Corey was my brother.
He had tried it for the first time with me.
So he ended up laying down for a nap and didn't wake up.
That's when I got the angel.
So he's like my guardian angel and he's looking down
on my demons, kind of keeping them at bay.
And then this just personalizes it.
It puts his name on it.
He called me his big brother.
I called him my little brother.
And if I'm a true fucking big brother,
if I'm my brother's keeper,
then I shouldn't have been fuckin',
should've been there for him.
- You can do it, you hear me?
- Yeah.
- This is Detroit.
I talked to her earlier and she said to go on and
you'll catch up, so, should we go?
Should we go, man?
- I don't know, man, I don't know.
- Stretch it out. - You can do this.
You got this.
- When you're running a 100 miler,
it's a mind, body, and spiritual thing.
The first third of the race is all body.
It's all physical.
Second to the race is all mental.
And the third part of the race is spiritual.
It's a spiritual experience.
That's about the only thing that's gonna carry you
through that last third of that race.
I come here sometimes.
My brother's buried here.
My dad's buried here too.
He always asked me, he always asked, "How's he doing?"
I said, "Dad, not good.
He's not doin' good."
That was my biggest nightmare was
that I would have to bury him,
my only son, beside my only brother and my dad.
That scared me more than anything else in the world.
I don't think it's right
for a mother to have to bury their child.
- I was supposed to be on a flight home
because my grandfather had passed away.
And I remember Kelly answering the phone
and receiving my collect call from jail.
And I was telling them they needed to bail me out
so I could make it home for the funeral.
I just wanted bailed out of jail.
He had his third felony conviction
in the state of Texas.
He could have gone to prison for 20 years.
- I remember the first time sitting there
talking to the lawyer and he had opened the file
and was like, "Man, what do you want me to do with this?
They got you red handed and I can't really fight this.
You know, this is your third near fourth possession case.
And he wants to charge you with habitual criminal."
- Maybe that's what Shawn needed
was to know, here's your options.
Here's your options, either get clean,
or you're going there for 20 years or longer.
I remember standing over my grandfather's grave
saying goodbye to him, standing
over his casket and just this overwhelming feeling
of guilt coming over me, of knowing just everything
that was going on back in Texas and, you know,
all this stuff I had been doing
and the drugs and just everything,
the deception with my family.
And I just remember that going on
and just the guilt I felt standing over his grave.
- That was one of the most difficult days of my life
was a judge in Texas had his life literally in his hands.
And it could have gone either way.
- I had this folder of all this stuff I had done
at the VA and all the letters I had gotten
from the people at AA and handed it to my lawyer.
And he opened up the folder
and I just remember his jaw dropping.
He goes, "You really have given me something to work with.
Like you've obviously started to change your life.
So whatever you're doing, you need to keep doing it."
And so I just remember
that was like the one moment right there,
where it had just given me this ray of hope.
And I just had this overwhelming sense
of this is my last shot.
Like I have to do this, I have to change.
I go running to kind of settle my mind, settle my thinking.
I wanted to find out who I was and I wanted it to be me
'cause I know me is good enough for them.
You know, I never realized the destruction
it was having at home.
So I never understood, when I first got sober,
why are these people so,
you know, why won't my sister talk to me?
And why is she so bitter with me?
The brother and sister bond, it's, I don't know, man.
My relationship with my sister
is one of the most important relationships
I have in my life.
- He wants to be in my life now,
but he doesn't understand everything that he missed.
And the years when I really needed a brother,
he wasn't there.
Those years were full of broken promises.
He missed pretty much every major milestone in my life.
He didn't see me graduate from high school or college.
Didn't take pictures with me before I went to prom.
Didn't do any of the typical stuff
that an older brother's usually there to do.
- I want him to be that big brother
that she could be proud of.
- I'm having a really hard time letting my guard down
because I guess in the back
of my mind, I'm just waiting for that phone call one day
saying that he had a relapse
'cause it's happened too many times before.
All right!
- Dude, 9 1, welcome!
- 91, thank you.
- 40, 40.
- Yeah, baby.
- Man, I had a little meltdown
at that last little place, didn't I?
Good thing that's over.
Where'd my guy go?
- Whatcha need? - Oh, my buddy!
My buddy.
Did he take off on me?
I hope not.
- Where'd he go?
Hey Troy!
Yo, where's my guy at?
- Is he up there? - I don't know,
but we're finishing this shit together.
What's his name?
- We've been calling each other Detroit and Youngstown.
I don't know his name, big tall dude.
- Oh no no no, you're good, I'll catch up with you.
I got nervous, they thought I was hallucinating.
I couldn't find you.
I was like, "No, man."
- One of the biggest things
that I try so hard to help people understand is
that the people we're working with are humans.
They reflect humanity, they matter.
Their addiction and the impact of the addiction
on the families and the guilt and the shame
that families and clients experience is a by-product
of the way we view addiction in society.
- My name's Shawn, I'm a drug addict.
Hey, Shawn.
- During his recovery, he's had the opportunity
to reflect on his past, talk about it and work through it.
And I haven't.
So we're kind of at that process now
where he's just kind of waiting
for me to bring my guard down a little bit
so we can talk about what happened in the past.
- There were days at the beginning
where I didn't want to wake up and run,
but I would like tell myself, like,
is me making this decision to not get up and go run today,
is that gonna help me stay sober?
Is that gonna help me stay out of prison?
But, you know, the man I wanted to be,
the man I wanted to become, gets his ass out
of bed and wakes up and goes and runs those miles.
- I started seeing a therapist and I started talking more
about my feelings and trying to break down those walls
that I had spent so long building up.
And that's why I say it's so important
to talk because for the past 10, 15 years, I never talked.
I thought I had to be strong
for my family, for my parents, especially my mom.
And you just get to the point that you break.
You just can't be strong all the time
and you can't live your life that way.
- I got sober on April 18th, 2017,
and I've never been this sober in my adult life, ever.
- His addiction didn't happen overnight, his recovery won't.
Our family coming back together
won't happen overnight either.
- And the next day the sun comes up
and like, your body starts warming up
and that was like, I got this sense of hope.
I'm like, "Man, I'm gonna finish this."
You know, I made it through the night.
That was definitely the hardest part.
And everything in your brain is telling you to quit.
I'm running in these last seven miles,
and so off in the distance I could see
the high school football stadium
and I could feel myself start to get choked up.
And I was like, "Oh my God, like this is gonna happen.
I'm gonna do this."
And so there was just this determination
that I'm gonna stroll into that football stadium, so proud.
I couldn't wait to get back and text my mom,
text my sister and let 'em know that I finished this race.
I know my grandma's at home on her iPad looking
and following along with me.
So that's what I'm thinking
about as I'm coming in and I'm thinking about, you know,
two years ago, I was just getting out of prison.
You know, two years ago I was trying to kick drugs.
Two years ago, my family wouldn't even talk to me.
And now they're following along
on an app while I finished this 100 mile race.
I loved watching him
go to prom and get all dressed up,
and his dates would always come over
and I'd force my way into a bunch of pictures.
My mom said that he always loved playing with me.
This is usually around the time he'd wrestle me in bed.
This was a fun family vacation.
- So I come rolling up on the high school football stadium
and I can hear the people,
and I can hear like bells going off.
And I see the stadium and I come into the stadium
and I come around the track and I hit the straightaway.
- That was the first time he held me
when I came home from the hospital.
- I look at the finish and everybody's cleared out.
- Yeah, just...
It really reminds me that he was there for me since day one,
even though sometimes I didn't feel like he was.
- And all I see is my mom's blonde hair
and my sister standing next to her.
And I had no idea that hey were even
that invested in me running that race,
but here they made it their down to Alabama
to surprise me at the end.
And it was the most special moment
I've ever had in my entire life.
It meant more to me than you can ever imagine,
to know everything that I been through,
everything I put them through
and they still loved me, cared enough.
They were gonna come see me finish
one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life.
And I just remember cryin'
and huggin' them so tight and being so proud.
And it would have been one thing
to text them and let them know I had finished.
But for them to see that, to see me come in,
see me looking strong, it meant the world to me.
There was a low point after I finished the 100 mile race.
There was like a, I've read that there's a thing called,
like it's like a runner's depression.
And I was a little banged up.
I had tried to carry all that training into the next race
and had gotten injured and had to take downtime.
I went through like a little a valley where I was like,
"Do I even want to keep running?
Like, do I really still love this?
Do I still have a passion for it?"
And so I started asking myself these hard questions,
much like when I was a kid,
if I'm not a basketball player, you know, what am I?
Now it's like, if I'm not a runner, you know, what am I?
It just kinda made me sit down
and really evaluate and appreciate
that I needed to take a little bit better approach
to this and looking into getting into a coach.
- My name is Joe Prusaitis and
I am, right now, currently coaching ultra distance runners,
but particularly Shawn Livingston.
- We call them one of the forefathers
of trail running, especially in Texas, Joe Prusaitis,
he's one of the most knowledgeable guys I know.
- I mean, I'm not here to kiss his ass.
I'm here to help him get past all the bad shit
and get into the good stuff.
My job, more than anything,
besides giving them a training plan
is to watch Shawn, pay attention
to Shawn, and see how he's feeling.
It just blew me away, what a freak this guy was,
a phenom he is at running,
and he didn't have a clue what he was doing.
You look at Shawn and you're like, man, he's a diamond.
He's a guy that's been down the shit hole
and he's come out the other end and he's polished the edges.
I mean, he's just got an amazing aura about him.
The guy's just on, he's on.
- For years, I've tried to fill this void in my heart
with doing drugs and alcohol and all this other things
and, you know, nothing could ever fill it.
But when I started running
and I got in touch with this great group
of people and started working
with other veterans and started working with at-risk youth,
that's what started filling
that void in my heart to the fact that, you know,
I wake up with a smile
on my face and it's not this dreadful life anymore
where I'm like, ugh, another day.
I'm like, yes, another day.
I'm just happy to be here, man.
- I always told Shawn,
I said, you know, you have to have a plan in life.
And so as long as he can be
at peace with his past, and he has a plan
to move forward, that's all I can ask for.
- He's Shawn again, I'm proud of him for that.
You gotta be some type of a monster to wake yourself up
and decide to go run 100 miles in a day.
- We've been through so many bad times
with him that it's nice to remember the good times.
And it's just nice to
remember that he's still my superhero.
- So have you ever been to River's Place?
- Hayes runs out there all the time.
I've never done that run.
- So I go do repeats out there all the time,
but I remember running at Bull Creek one time
and the sun was just coming up
and I had just come out this part where the trees are parted
and was with a group of my running friends
that I run with on Sunday.
And I just remember looking
at that whole scene in North Austin Hills
and everything like that,
and I'm like, it's giving me goosebumps now.
Like that's when I was like, "Man, my life has changed."