Dante Liberato Is Studying the Impact of Psychedelics on Running. He’s the Guinea Pig.

Dante Liberato was somewhere around Olathe, Colorado, on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.

Wait, scratch that.

Maybe it wasn’t a chemical taking hold of Liberato, but rather exhaustion from having jogged 241 miles across mountain ranges and river valleys. No matter what it was, a powerful force made him to sit down on the side of an empty road.

“I felt absolutely miserable in that moment,” Liberato, 26, told Outside in a recent interview. “I was realizing how much further I had to go, and how much longer it was going to take.”

This moment marked the crux of a seemingly insane personal challenge that Liberato—an ultrarunner, coach, and yes, regular psychedelics user—took on in 2025. Over the course of 11 days, Liberato ran 500 miles from his home in Colorado Springs, Colorado, to Moab, Utah.

Along the way, he ingested LSD and psilocybin, a naturally occurring psychotropic found in certain mushrooms. A film crew followed Liberato’s every step for a forthcoming documentary, titled Dante, about his very unorthodox approach to endurance sports.

Spoiler alert: Liberato completed the journey, celebrating the feat by eating an ice cream sandwich at a small grocery store in downtown Moab. But in the moment outside the town of Olathe, the whole adventure seemed too great. Liberato was forced to stop and wrestle with inner demons that even a dose of magic mushrooms couldn’t tamp down.

And the battle he fought on the roadside could shed light on the substances he, and a growing number of Americans, now take for therapeutic purposes.

“I got to a point where it became exhausting taking the medication,” Liberato told me. “I would get overwhelmed with fatigue, and I’d think the psychedelics would help me overcome it, but they’d make me even more tired. I realized that with medicine, there was an emotion hiding behind the fatigue, and I had to learn to let go of that.”

An Unlikely Ultrarunner

Let’s back up. Liberato’s story has many twists and turns, including his entry into endurance sports. Long before his jog across one-sixth of the country, Liberato was a professional mixed-martial arts fighter who aspired to fight in the octagonal cage of the Ultimate Fighting Championships.

In 2021,  he ruptured his quadricep during a fight, and the injury spelled the end of those aspirations.

“It was the last of a bunch of serious injuries,” he said. “I had broken my spine, broken arms and legs—I’d been through it.”

The setback came during a dicey period in Liberato’s life. He was in an unhealthy romantic relationship, his personal identity was wrapped up in cage fighting, and he was a regular drinker.

One day, on a whim, Liberato jogged from his preferred liquor store back to his home. The run became a regular ritual. A proverbial lightbulb went on inside his brain: Running is fun!  He quickly traded one passion for another.

“I wanted to prove to myself that I was more than a fighter,” he said. 

The transition from fighting to running came amid another personal transformation. Liberato began visiting a psychotherapist amid his breakup with cage fighting, and the doctor recommended therapy sessions with the drug MDMA. The medication helped Liberato, and he began using other psychotropic drugs for therapy.

Liberato said he wanted to change who he was.

“When I was a fighter, I was consumed by the thought of hurting people, because that’s what you do,” he said. “If I was going to become a better human being, I was going to need to find a new way of thinking.”

Psychedelics Have Uses Beyond Recreation

There’s a growing body of evidence suggesting that some psychedelic drugs can help people with psychological disorders.  A 2025 study published in the journal JAMA found that a single dose of pharmaceutical-grade LSD might alleviate anxiety symptoms for several months.

But both psilocybin and LSD are classified by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration as Schedule 1 substances, alongside the description: high potential for abuse with no medical benefits. And both are more associated with hippies and partying than with a medicine cabinet. The classification and stigma, historically, have stymied scientists from understanding the true benefits they may have for patients. Instead, research has been conducted in ad hoc scenarios.

You know, like during cross-country ultra-endurance runs.

Fernando Gonzalez, the filmmaker behind Dante, believes psychedelics are becoming less stigmatized as more Americans realize their value as legitimate medication. Showing the therapeutic side of psychedelics was one reason why Gonzalez pursued the film.

“I have a lot of people in my life who have benefitted from these substances,” Gonzalez told Outside. “I think a lot of people are waking up to see that the stuff we were told about The War On Drugs in the seventies and eighties was a lie.”

Colorado legalized psilocybin use in 2023, opening the door for licensed medical businesses and healing centers to operate. Today, a growing number of healing centers and therapists help newbies try out the substances. By the time Colorado changed its laws, Liberato had become a regular user of LSD and psilocybin, and had begun teaching others how to use them for medicinal purposes at a healing center near Colorado Springs.

“My biggest takeaway is that none of these medicines will give you the answers to your problems,” Liberato said. “You have to first go through a process internally of creating a healthy relationship with your environment and your community.”

A Mid-Race Epiphany

Liberato was nearing the end of his first 100-mile race, Colorado’s Silverheels Trail Run in Breckenridge, in 2024 when he had another running-related epiphany. He was battling exhaustion and pain—until a friend gave him a dose of LSD.

The drug, Liberato said, was akin to rocket fuel. His fatigue faded, and his ability to focus on the remaining miles narrowed. Liberato began sprinting.

“I felt amazing—I ran the last four miles as fast as I could,” Liberato said. “I thought about running back to the hotel after I finished. I wanted to keep going.”

By then, Liberato had become a full-time coach, training aspiring MMA fighters at his own gym, which he calls The Den. He also started a company called Couchmilk that offers guidance on psychedlic usage to athletes.

At the ultramarathon, he saw a correlation between the medication and his own body’s athletic performance. Could psychedelics make you better at ultra-endurance events? He sought some type of physical challenge to test his idea, and came up with the idea of his massive run to Moab. If he could run an average of around 50 miles a day, each day, he could complete the journey in under two weeks.

As he was preparing for the run, Liberato was put in touch with Gonzalez, who had become a regular at the retreat center. Gonzalez had been looking for a psychedelic user to profile for his film. In Liberato, he found the ideal subject.

“He was very driven and had this positive energy that made you want to work with him,” Gonzalez said.

After a few weeks of back-and-forth, Liberato agreed to be the subject of the film. In a matter of weeks, Gonzalez began documenting his daily life with his video crew.

Gonzalez filmed Liberato for more than a year before he embarked on his run to Moab. He chronicled Liberato’s long runs, his life at home, and his therapy sessions with psychedelics.

“He was going to do something that was supposed to be intimate and personal,” Gonzalez said. “And I hijacked it.”

A Difficult Journey

Liberato set off from Colorado Springs in mid-October 2025. He ran anywhere from 11 to 14 hours a day, stopping at night to camp and rest. As the miles ticked off, his body developed strains, muscle pulls, and other injuries. He took a potent cocktail of medication, including psilocybin and LSD.

Liberato’s mood ebbed and flowed as the journey unfolded. The shifts were brought about by weather, his energy level, and his relationship with his pacers and the film crew. In addition to cameramen, Liberato invited several friends to follow him in his chase caravan. The journey kicked off with a party-like atmosphere. But as Liberato and his crew grew exhausted, the vibe shifted.

“I really wanted to have positive energy at the campsite, and there were times when I got really frustrated with people,” he said. “I noticed in myself I wasn’t always carrying the love.”

And as Liberato progressed, he learned that the medications sometimes helped him and other times were a hindrance, causing severe anxiety and even a loss of energy. The focus he felt during the Silverheels 100 came and went. During a multi-day run, the drugs were less effective, he said.

Liberato took psychedelics less frequently as the run unfolded. Instead, he turned to other methods for soothing his emotional highs and lows.

“I had to let go of a ton of emotion a few times and just really cry and wail for two or three minutes,” he said. “After those sessions, I’d feel a lightning bolt of energy and drive.”

I won’t spoil the rest. How Liberato navigated the shifting vibes, psychedelics, exhaustion, and emotional stress forms the backbone of the film Dante, and I plan to view the project when Gonzalez finishes editing it. The filmmaker hopes to release the documentary later in 2026, and he is operating a GoFundMe page to help pay for the production.

I will spoil one tidbit about the journey.

“I kept thinking about what would be the perfect ending to my journey,” Liberato said. “Eating an ice cream sandwich was pretty close to it.”