Around mile 85 of the 100-mile Silverheels Trail Run above Breckenridge last year, Dante Liberato was bonking. Someone gave the retired cage fighter a dose of psychedelics — he doesn’t want to say exactly what — and within minutes he was having fun.
“It brought me out of this hole and by the finish I really wanted to keep running,” said the 27-year-old.
Last month Liberato ran 500 miles from his gym in Manitou Springs to Moab in 11 days, eating LSD and psilocybin mushrooms the whole way.
He was followed by a film crew, as well as nurses, a therapist and fellow athletes.
“There is a bridge we are building right now in this country that connects our society and culture with the way things should be as we build a more self-aware society,” said Liberato. “This documentary is one brick in that bridge.”
Liberato has been laying those bricks for several years.
He runs a martial arts gym in Manitou Springs called The Den that blends strength and strategy training for mixed-martial-arts fighters with “a holistic approach to growth” that emphasizes mindfulness, consciousness and connection. Some locals call it the “Hippy Gym.”
Liberato founded an app-based company, Couchmilk, that helps train athletes with workouts and psilocybin dosing with a promise “to unlock human potential by leading the next frontier in performance and recovery through psychedelic- science, data-driven methods and community-powered growth.”
He’s also coaching several competitive cage-match fighters who train with psychedelics. The Couchmilk program infuses app-tracked, data-based psychedelic use with training and recovery programs. Not one of the Couchmilk-trained fighters has lost a fight, he said.
“There is a lot of conditioning that our society has done to get us to think a certain way about what matters. Telling us that we need to have money and status and appearance and physique,” he said. “All that does is disconnect us from each other and our environment. I hope this movie can help people see what really matters.”
The “Dante” documentary – check out the teaser that just dropped this week – is by a new production company called Suffer Films founded by nascent Colorado Springs filmmaker Fernando Gonzalez.
A year ago Gonzalez participated in a month-long Buddhist retreat in South Korea. The last week was spent in silence, meditating for 10 hours a day. On his return home, he upended his life. After years of running a successful dog training business, he ordered $20,000 worth of camera equipment and decided to go all-in making movies.
“Dante” is his first project and he’s paying for everything out of his pocket. He tried to get sponsors. Running companies were initially intrigued by a retired bare-knuckle brawler and a relatively new runner seeking transformation in a 500-mile run.
“We had lots of meetings and all these companies wanted a piece of this documentary until we mentioned the psychedelics part.” said Gonzalez, who has launched a GoFundMe campaign to offset production costs. “The second they heard psychedelics they were out. They would tell us that they personally were taking psychedelics, but that it was not a good look for the brand. I understand that, but it seems hypocritical to take that stance around something that is being normalized in so many places.”
Gonzalez is not too troubled by the lack of support from the running world.
“This is not a running documentary. This is an inherently captivating story that will shake up the running community,” he said. “This is meant to inspire people to do difficult shit and pursue something that makes us feel human. That’s why I named this production company Suffer Films. Life is pain and life is suffering and it’s about how you react to it and how you deal with this makes life enjoyable and beautiful.”
The documentary features two different approaches to psychedelics. There is a ceremonial approach with a lot of reverence and respect. And then there’s use of LSD and mushrooms as a performance enhancer.
The latter is not well understood in circles outside the realm of people who are finding athletic benefits from less-than-large dosing of psychedelics.
“There is this stigma that you just sit around tripping and seeing weird shit, but it’s way more versatile than that,” said Gonzalez, who has consulted with lawyers and psychedelic industry insiders to craft careful messaging for first-timers that emphasize harm reduction and integration strategies that include help from therapists and practitioners who can help translate trips into personal growth.
“It’s really important to me that people who have never experienced psychedelics understand both the benefits and risks and the responsibility of doing their own research,” he said.
Gonzalez said Liberato “is the perfect human to deliver this message.”
“He’s very empathetic and in tune with his feelings, but he’s also this imposing figure who is physically as dangerous as a man can be,” Gonzalez said of the longtime MMA fighter.