From Drinking Every Morning to Running 340 Miles: Tommie Runz on Recovery, Running & Redemption

Why does anybody keep drinking alone in the mornings, year after year, knowing exactly what it’s doing to them?

Because for a while, it works – until it doesn’t.

That was Tommie Runz for fifteen years.

He’s sober now. He’s an accomplished runner. A font of positive influence. And a fellow Michigander. Today he shares his experience, strength, and hope.

Tommie is a sobriety advocate and co-host of the PR Project, nine years sober, who ran all six marathon majors in a single calendar year before moving onto the trails and finishing Western States this summer. In early 2025 he ran 340 miles solo from Santa Monica to Las Vegas, and made a film about it called Hero.

But the running is downstream of everything else, and he’ll be the first to tell you so.

So start at seventeen, in a high school hallway. Two weeks later he came-to on a bathroom floor with his mother and his principal standing over him. A ‘normal’ person would be scared straight. It might be the most accelerated case of alcoholism I’ve ever heard. Tommie switched to beer and eased back in, because it made him comfortable in his own skin for the first time. Alcohol is a solution to a problem. It’s not the problem.

The word functional is the wrong word for the fifteen years that followed. He was operating dysfunctionally, just not so much that anyone made him stop. Every failed dry January was another deposit in the hopelessness and desperation piggy bank.

What ended it was telling the truth three times in one week.

He’s owning his past now. And when a man tells you he’s proud of himself, that’s growth. That’s health.