When Amber Graziano-Cano was 14 years old, she fell in love with running. As a freshman cross-country runner, she enjoyed the positive and competitive team culture at Granada High School in Livermore, California. At 14, Graziano-Cano also fell in love with drinking.
To celebrate making the varsity softball team as a freshman, she tagged along with her older teammates to a party, where they poured her a shot of peppermint schnapps. Her mind soon buzzed from the syrupy booze, and she was instantly hooked. She loved how alcohol could melt away her adolescent stress and make her more social at the older students’ parties.
The rest of high school followed a similar pattern: cross country in the fall, softball in the spring, and drinking all year long. By graduation, Graziano-Cano had become a San Francisco Bay–area All-Star on the diamond and signed to play for Baylor University on a full athletic scholarship. She even entertained thoughts of someday contending in the Olympics.
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But at Baylor, the stakes were higher, and Graziano-Cano couldn’t deliver. She drank every day, let her fitness slide, and grew to see softball as a job, not a passion. After just one season, she lost her spot on the team and returned home to California to enroll at Cal State San Marcos near San Diego. Her softball career was suddenly over.
Still, Graziano-Cano had a competitive urge, so she started running again, competing in half and full marathons. She strung together a five-year streak of running the San Diego Marathon, even qualifying for and running the Boston Marathon. But for every hard-earned weekend PR, she celebrated with postrace drinks just as intensely.
Identify Your Weaknesses
As she entered her 30s, Graziano-Cano’s wild party days turned into calmer (albeit frequent) wine tastings around the San Francisco Bay Area, a world-class wine region. Newly married and employed as an elementary school teacher, she had seemingly achieved a manageable balance between boozing and adulting.
It wasn’t until Graziano-Cano became a parent that she started to recognize she might have a problem. While she took a break from heavy drinking during her pregnancies with Lucca, now 6 years old, and Rocco, now 5, the competing demands of marriage, motherhood, and her career combined to wear her down. “Before I knew it, I was drinking more than I ever did,” she says.
With two toddlers under her care, Graziano-Cano grew to feel guilty about her drinking habits. She knew her problem was partly genetic—she has a family history of alcoholism—and partly the product of an addictive personality. “I felt like I wasn’t being the best mom, teacher, and runner that I could be,” she says. “My marriage was also really struggling. I felt desperate, like I had to stop.”
Until that point, Graziano-Cano had been intentionally private about her drinking. No one knew her addiction had quietly controlled her life for 20 years—not even close friends or family. So when she decided to get sober, she kept it low-key. And when she failed, she secretly tried again. “I was hoping I could quit drinking, I would be fixed, and nobody would have to know about it,” she says. “But it turned into this grand journey that I was on.”
Find Your Tribe
Graziano-Cano struggled to gain momentum in her quest for sobriety. She knew something had to change, so she turned outward. Graziano-Cano perused online groups centered around sobriety and attended an addiction support group at a local church. “I found people who were further ahead in their sobriety and people with success stories who could give me advice,” she says. “That’s when I really found my success.”
Graziano-Cano had her last drink on May 26, 2020, and six months later, she shared her journey on Facebook. “I wanted to let people know that if they’re struggling with alcohol, they’re not alone,” she says. “I feel like the more people that are open about it, the better, to reduce the stigma and normalize sobriety.”
Sober at last, Graziano-Cano believed her life had finally started. “I got a sense of mental clarity that I never had before,” she says. “I felt all of this extra energy.” With her newfound vigor, she craved an outlet to fill the void that drinking had left—and she found it in running. She trained much more consistently and explored new kinds of races, including ultramarathons. No more hungover long runs. No more binge drinking after races. And when Graziano-Cano had a hunch she wasn’t the only runner who had struggled with substance abuse, she made her most important stride yet.
Be an Ally and a Resource
In 2021, Graziano-Cano formed a Facebook group called Recovery Road Runners to create a place for sober runners (and aspiring sober runners) to congregate and navigate the often tumultuous and lonely path of battling substance abuse together. Soon, the group swelled to over 1,000 members, mostly by word of mouth. “It’s a safe space where people can relate to each other,” she says. “People feel really comfortable with each other, because we’ve gone through such a deep emotional experience. Overcoming addiction is one of the hardest things that anybody can do.”
While some members of the group are lifelong runners like Graziano-Cano, others have discovered running on their path to recovery. “Once you get sober, you realize you have all this extra time, money, and energy—you have to replace drinking with something,” she says. “For many people, endurance sports fill that void.” Group members interact with karmic compassion, receiving emotional support while encouraging those who need it. Some post milestones of their “Soberversary.” Others somberly admit, “Day one for me again.”
The Recovery Road Runners Facebook page is open to anyone who needs it. But Graziano-Cano, who recently earned a Road Runners Club of America certification, has also started to offer private one-on-one coaching. She also organizes meetups at big races, and she hosted a sober running retreat in Lake Tahoe in June of 2022.
Graziano-Cano used to say, “I’ve always been a runner, and I’ve always been a drinker.” Alcohol and exercise pushed and pulled her for over two decades, but now her relationship with running has transcended past a way to justify late-night beers or fight off a hangover. “Running has become a spiritual outlet for me,” she says. “It turned from being physical to being spiritually and emotionally satisfying.”
Theo Kahler is the newsletters editor for Runner’s World, Bicycling, and Popular Mechanics. He’s a former all-conference collegiate runner who’s based in Easton, PA.
