My heart was hammering inside my chest. My pulse was well over 160 beats-per-minute. My breathing was ragged as my lungs desperately tried to take in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide. My entire system was flooded with hormones: cortisol, norepinephrine, serotonin, dopamine, endocannabinoids, and most importantly, glorious endorphins.
I was eight miles into a half marathon (13.1 miles). I had never run faster.
It was a spectacular Oregon spring day. The temperature was a crisp 57-degrees Fahrenheit. The sky was a chalky blue. The Vernonia Half Marathon took runners along the Banks-Vernonia State Trail next to an abandoned railroad track. Huge evergreen trees lined both sides of the course. It felt as if I was running through a green tunnel. The air was filled with the smell of fresh pine needles.
As I continued pounding the pavement, I was filled with an overwhelming desire: I would give nearly anything for a beer.
One of my favorite lines in all of literature comes from Green Hill of Africa by Ernest Hemingway. At the end of a long stream of consciousness flashback about his travels around the world, Hemingway writes “We outgrew some countries and we went to others but beer was still a bloody marvel.”
Had Hemingway ever come to Oregon in this millennium, I am certain he would have been blown away by the 300-plus breweries in the Beaver State. Not only would Papa Hemingway have loved the options, he would have loved beer culture. A generation of Oregonian millennials—myself included—came of age wearing flannel and drinking IPAs at hole-in-the wall brewpubs.
Grilled cheese and tomato soup may be a pleasant combination, but to me, nothing goes quite so well together as running and beer. Some of the happiest moments of my life have been finishing a half, full or ultra marathon and cracking open a beer to celebrate.
Tristan Stephenson is an elite professional ultramarathoner in Great Britian with multiple ultra wins. He is also the host of The Curious Bartender Podcast. Stephenson agrees with me about the perfect combination of running and alcohol.
“I’m something of a thrill seeker,” Stephenson says. “I’m someone who likes to probe the more extreme elements of living and life and consciousness. There’s something in the thrill of running and being outdoors. And the high of running is similar to drinking.”
The desire for alcohol following a run is not just a good vibrations thing. There is actual science behind it.
“Sometimes the craving for alcohol is actually the result of our blood sugar,” says Brooke Scheller, a doctor of clinical nutrition and the author of How to Eat to Change How You Drink. “With exercise, our body can be in a state of low blood sugar. We need something as a source of fuel.”
Well, the Irish call Guiness food. And my wife Sarah and I both come from very Irish families. This means we have had a front row seat to the decimating ravages of alcoholism with friends and family. While our proximity to alcoholics is a risk factor for developing the disease ourselves, it has also been a huge incentive to be very careful with our consumption.
Neither of us had any problem giving alcohol up completely while Sarah was pregnant three years ago.
It was while Sarah was pregnant that I made what would become one of the best discoveries of my life. One afternoon, I came home from the store with a sixpack of nonalcoholic (NA) beer. It was delicious. Yes, it was missing the pleasant, relaxing impact of real booze, but the taste and the ambiance were identical to the best beer. I did not know it then, but that first taste of good NA beer would send me on a journey toward a healthier lifestyle and faster miles.
Nonalcoholic beer is made in a very similar way to its boozy counterpart. The main difference is the brewing time, the brewing temperature and the ratio of ingredients used. To make tasty NA beer, brewers must use higher quality ingredients (hops, barley, malt) so that they stand up to the alterations in the brewing process.
“It’s similar to making an iced coffee where if you don’t use really strong coffee, the drink will be diluted,” says Joe Chura, the president of Go Brewing, an uber successful, nationally distributed nonalcoholic beer company. “In our nonalcoholic beer, we use higher quality ingredients than you would find in traditional beers. It’s more expensive. But it balances off because you don’t need to use as much of those ingredients because you are trying to prevent the beer from fermenting above 0.5-percent (alcohol).”
The result is a beverage with around the trace amount of alcohol that you would find in a banana (under 0.5 percent alcohol by volume) with a fraction of the calories of a traditional beer. And yet, NA beer still looks and tastes like beer. Even an alcohol aficionado like Stephenson sings the praises of NA beer.
“I am a big fan of nonalcoholic beer,” Stephenson says. “When you take the alcohol out of beer, you haven’t halted the product that much. I regularly drink nonalcoholic beer.”
After my daughter Morgan was born, I continued drinking nonalcoholic beer on occasion, but I happily returned to consuming alcohol again. In fact, pizza with a smuggled in hefeweizen was the celebration meal Sarah and I had in the hospital room the day after Morgan was born.
Perhaps it was having spent Morgan’s entire gestation without a drink, or perhaps it was that I was getting into my late-30s, but suddenly, hangovers had gone from a mild annoyance to horrendous. At 27-years-old, I was able to spend a Friday night at a brewpub with friends and then clip through a 20-mile Saturday morning run. At 37-years-old, a glass of wine with dinner left me with a terrible night’s sleep, a headache, anxiety and an easy excuse to skip a run.
Scheller says that I am not imagining that my hangovers have gotten worse with age.
“As we age, our bodies are less resilient to stress,” Scheller says. “Alcohol is a stressor that takes a high toll on our liver to be metabolized. We require a lot of energy and Vitamin B3 to break down that alcohol. Think about the cellular aging process and the degradation of the body. As we get older, we don’t respond to stressors like alcohol as easily as we did when we were 25 and there was less stress on our system and our immune systems were still highly functional.”
Well, I was a new father, and I was not drinking very much anymore. I figured that a hangover every so often was just the cost of having a little bit of fun. Another one of my favorite literary quotes is by John Steinbeck from his book Travels with Charley. Steinbeck wrote that he had always, “taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment.”
(It is not lost on me that my literary heroes were probably clinical alcoholics, but neither should it be lost that they were also Nobel Prize Laureates.)
Around the time I was noticing just how lousy alcohol was making me feel, I got a fitness wearable. Looking at my biometrics following only a couple of drinks at a Fourth of July barbeque was horrifying. My resting heartrate was 16 beats per minute faster than average. My heartrate variability plummeted by almost 20-percent. My respiratory rate rose over 10-percent.
If I could have assigned a visual to how I felt looking at my biometrics, it would be the vomiting emoji. Here I was training for endurance races, doing yoga, eating organic food, trying to be the healthiest version of myself for my wife and daughter, and I was consuming something that was literally poisoning me? Whether a punishment or a consequence, I now had data that hangovers were not just annoying. Drinking was legitimately bad for my health.
“There was such a long period of time where we believed that alcohol had these health benefits,” Scheller says. “It really created this health halo around alcohol. But when you look at alcohol scientifically, it’s rated as a Group 1 carcinogen like tobacco and asbestos. We would be very unlikely to recommend one cigarette a day, or just a little bit of asbestos exposure.
“There’s negative influence on our cardiovascular health. There’s cancer. But those things can seem kind of far away. What it really comes down to is that alcohol influences us on a daily basis. It influences our gut microbiome. It influences our hormones, our cortisol, our stress hormones. It has day-to-day impacts on us.”
Well, the halo of alcohol was gone. I cut my drinking to almost nothing.
Much like I do not identify as having an alcohol use disorder, I also do not identify as “sober.” Telling myself I cannot have a drink is the surest way to get me to crave a stout. It is the same way that telling myself I cannot have a donut is the surest way to send me to a bakery. I simply stopped drinking booze almost completely.
I replaced the liquor I had once drunk with nonalcoholic beers. I had NA beer at a friend’s 50th birthday party. I had NA beer on New Years Eve. I had an NA beer on my own birthday. My favorite way to unwind after a long week at work became a 10-mile run followed by an organic, grassfed cheeseburger and a nonalcoholic IPA.
I found myself living the ethos of the nonalcoholic beer movement.
“It’s really about being able to celebrate every sort of moment in life with a beer, but without compromise,” says Chris Furnari, the senior communications manager at Athletic Brewing, another giant player in the nonalcoholic beer industry. “You’re able to be fully present, live in the moment and stay social, just without the next day regrets.”
With alcohol mostly removed from my life, it was easy to hit every running workout, and my mile splits became faster and faster.
Chura also experienced the huge benefits of sobriety during a 75-day alcohol free challenge before he founded Go Brewing.
“I had been under the cloud of alcohol pretty much the majority of my life,” Chura says. “There hadn’t been a week that I hadn’t consumed something. When I went on this journey, I started to notice my skin looked better, I woke up with less anxiety, I was leaner and not bloated. And I had only been drinking a few times a week. Alcohol was a slow burn. Over time, it was destroying me. I didn’t even realize it until I went away from alcohol.”
Not drinking is no longer a fringe decision. A report from The Business Research Company valued the global NA beer market at $23.84 billion in 2025.
As I drastically cut back my drinking, I was surprised to find how many friends and family were doing the same. I was even more surprised to realize that the friends and family who continued drinking really could not care less whether I was drinking or not. Approaching 40-years-old, the college peer pressure to drink had finally disappeared.
There remained just one final place to swap traditional beer for nonalcoholic beer: post-race.
I hit the store to pick up my favorite nonalcoholic IPA the night before the Vernonia Half Marathon. For a moment, standing before the enormous fridge filled with all the beers I had once loved, I felt a little nostalgic sadness. I could taste so many post-race beers. It had been a massive part of who I was as a runner since I began signing up for races more than a decade earlier. I knew that it was OK to be sad about that time of my life ending. But I was older, and I had a daughter, and I now had options that did not include a debilitating hangover. Thinking about all I had gained for what little I had given up, I grabbed a sixpack of NA beer and headed home.
In the last miles of the Vernonia Half Marathon, the course took us off the Banks-Vernonia Trail and through downtown Banks. I may have been somewhat delirious with oxygen debt, but I could swear that every third building I ran by was a bar, a winery or a brewery.
When I crossed the finish line, I looked down at my GPS watch and saw that I had shattered my previous best half marathon time by more than eight minutes.
I sent a text to Sarah: “Did it! PR! I. NEED. BEER!!!!!”
Later that evening, I sat at my dining room table with Sarah and Morgan. I was freshly showered, exhausted, and absolutely elated by my race. Between bites of my enormous, organic, grassfed cheeseburger, I raised a can of nonalcoholic beer to Sarah.
“Cheers,” Sarah said, clinking her own NA beer against mine.
I raised the can to my lips. I drank deeply. It tasted … perfect.
Even without alcohol, beer was still a bloody marvel.
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