The Long Run

An addict-turned-ultramarathon runner faces a new reality.

Metal clangs against metal and gold glints in the sunlight as Shawn Goertz places some—not all—of his ultramarathon medals around his neck.

“These are getting heavy,” he says with a slight wheeze as the medals rest on his chest.

At 53 years old, he has medals from across the nation: a medal made from a slice of wood from the Lake of the Ozarks State Park and another from a race in New Orleans with purple and green beads, reminiscent of Mardi Gras beads. Left out of his collection are all the medals he chose not to accept.

Since 2010, Shawn has run an ultramarathon—defined as any race longer than the standard 26.2 miles (42K) marathon—almost every year up to 2025.

“I get to do this. Nobody is making me, and I don’t have to, but there are so many people who can’t for all kinds of reasons,” he used to remind himself while running difficult treks.

Now, Shawn is one of those people who can’t.

Shawn has been battling shortness of breath, wheezing, chest tightness, a chronic cough, and a lack of energy for about four years. In 2025, he was officially diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), so he could no longer run like he used to.

While giving up a lifelong passion is hard, giving up a passion that has helped in overcoming an addiction is even harder.

PATH TO DEPENDENCE

Shawn grew up in Novelty with his mom, stepdad, and three sisters; his biological father left when he was only two years old. He struggled, feeling like he didn’t fit in with his family. “My stepdad would introduce me as his stepson and not introduce my sisters that way, so that led to part of how I felt different and like I didn’t belong,” Shawn says. By the time he was 16, his stepdad and mom had divorced, leaving Shawn to live with his stepdad.

When Shawn was 17, his stepdad directed him to stay at a friend’s house for a few days.

“He never came to pick me up, and he would never answer my phone calls,” Shawn says.

This left Shawn homeless, bouncing between friends’ couches, and eventually, he was placed under the care of his mother. She had a new boyfriend who didn’t support Shawn. Shawn was homeless again.

After the back-and-forth between his parents, Shawn found solace in drinking with friends. His drinking turned into smoking marijuana, then smoking marijuana became using methamphetamine. He had become an alcoholic and addict.

From 1994–2006, Shawn went to prison five times and rehab eight times. In 2006, he had a choice to make after failing a drug test during parole: He could either go to prison again or go to rehab for the ninth time. While he quit using methamphetamine in 2005, he continued to drink alcohol and use marijuana. Shawn chose to go to an inpatient treatment center in Phoenix, Arizona.

Drink, do drugs, rehab, and repeat, that was the cycle that haunted him. “I would do really well for a while, and then I would start drinking or doing drugs again and just lose everything. It was all repeated. And that was my life,” Shawn sighed. “I’d wanted to be sober. I’d wanted to be sober for years.”

This wasn’t the end of his journey though.

Shawn attended a 12-step addiction program, rooted in community, accountability, and spirituality, reaffirming having a fully committed attitude. With support and mentors, Shawn got sober in December 2007.

BUMPER STICKER DREAM

“What does that mean?” Shawn asked a friend after getting sober. Shawn was pointing to a bumper sticker that read “26.2.”

“That’s the distance in miles of a marathon,” the friend replied.

Shawn thought to himself, I’d like to have one of those, even though the only experience he had running was in high school physical education classes.

At 36 years old—inspired by that sticker—Shawn began training for his first marathon in 2009.

While training, Shawn realized that sticking to a rigid regimen of exercise was great for him mentally. It proved to himself and others that he could do hard things, that he could stay sober.

“I still believe this, that whether it’s a marathon or an ultra, it’s not the race, it’s the training that leads up to it,” Shawn says. “And I put in all the work, and it was all the months of training that I did. I never missed a run, no matter the weather. I ran in sleet and snow and rain. It felt like for the first time in my life, I was going to finish what I started.”

Part of what he is proud of is his ability to ask for help from other runners during training. Prior to this experience, he had avoided asking others for help because “he had too much ego,” Shawn says. In the breath work necessary for running, Shawn was also able to practice a type of meditation, a practice that others had urged him to discover while going through recovery.

“I had this idea that a marathon was this monster in the corner that I couldn’t complete, but I was like, ‘You know what? It doesn’t matter, and this is important,’ ” Shawn says.

MARATHON MILESTONE

Shawn initially attended the 2009 St. Louis marathon wearing a sweat suit he had worn in prison. When he walked up to the starting line, he took it off.

“When I took off that sweat suit, it was like my past coming off,” he says.

Shawn went into the marathon with a goal: to complete the race in four hours or less. But he immediately ran into an issue. He was playing a mental math game to track his time with an old-style digital watch and accidentally started his watch before crossing the official start line. He also got stuck behind other runners.

As the minutes and hours ticked by, the more worried he became that he wouldn’t taste the victory of the goal he had worked so hard for.

This looming feeling fueled each of Shawn’s steps as he ran with about 1,600 other runners.

“The whole race, I’m running scared, and I get to the to the very end, looking at my watch, and I almost start crying because, suddenly, my ideas at the start change, and suddenly, I was going to be a failure, and I ran as hard as I could for my last one or two minutes,” Shawn says.

Based on his chip timing (a digital chip inside a runner’s race bib that precisely tracks a runner’s time), Shawn completed the race in three hours and 52 minutes.

About 10 months later, Shawn ran his second marathon. However, he hated training for this race and running it. He found himself focusing on pacing and split times, or times recorded at specific intervals during a run, rather than the joy of exercise.

“In the middle of my second marathon, I was like, ‘This is stupid. This is not why I want to run,’ ” Shawn explains. “I thought I was done running because it turned into something I didn’t like.”

To get back into a healthier mental headspace with his hobby, he took some time off from running. Then, some friends invited him to a trail run at Rock Bridge Memorial State Park south of Columbia. It was amongst the trees in this park that Shawn rediscovered his love for the sport.

“For me, it was just completely like, this is what I want to do, just being immersed in nature and moving under my own power and not really caring about the paces or splits anymore, just seeing what’s around the next corner, the adventure of it,” Shawn says.

Through trail running, he discovered ultramarathons.

ULTRAMARATHON LIFE

Ultramarathons are longer than marathons, typically starting at a minimum of 31 miles. While the race is only about five miles longer than a regular marathon, runners usually take two extra hours because they are running on trails rather than paved roads, Shawn says. Since the race is on trails, runners often face unique challenges, such as getting lost in the woods, relieving themselves outdoors, and getting injuries from rocks and roots.

Ultramarathons have aid stations where runners can pick up supplies—like a change of clothes or lube for areas prone to friction burns. The food provided at aid stations for ultramarathons isn’t like the kind typically packed in a running vest. It isn’t running gels or protein shakes; instead, it’s regular food like soup, boiled potatoes, burritos, and grilled cheese sandwiches, Shawn says.

Shawn ran his first ultramarathon in October 2010 at Rock Bridge Memorial State Park in Columbia.

“Something about the phrase, ‘I can do hard things,’ I am not necessarily trying to prove something to myself, but it is something I need to do because it makes me better in the rest of my life,” he says. “There is something about a good ass kicking.” Despite the unprecedented sweltering heat, Shawn completed the ultramarathon.

Two years later, Shawn ran his favorite ultramarathon—a 50-mile race in Texas that qualified him for the Western States Endurance Run, the oldest 100-mile race in the world, located in California. While he ran in Texas, he recited the mantra, “I got through 15 years of hell when in addiction. I can get through the last 10 miles.”

Fifty miles. A distance longer than the drive from Springfield to Branson.

He had only six months to train for the Western States Endurance Run. Being crunched on training time and having to run the race in over 110-degree heat forced him to drop out about halfway through. While disappointed, Shawn doesn’t compete to have a gleaming gold medal around his neck but, instead, competes “against previous versions of himself,” he says.

In 2013, Shawn noticed something: he was gaining weight despite continuing to run 70 miles a week. He also noticed some numbness in his face and lips. After several tests, he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2014. He received radioactive iodine treatment and had surgery to remove his thyroid and the lymph nodes from his neck.

In 2015, only a year later, he ran another ultramarathon. Shawn says, “It was really hard, and it wasn’t fun.” But he did it anyway.

“Pain is your body telling you a lie,” Shawn says. “It is your body’s defense mechanism against uncomfortable things.” Shawn kept running. And running. And running. Each year, ultramarathons came and went.

For about 20 years, Shawn spent hours upon hours a week running, curated his meals to fuel his exercise, nursed blisters and injuries, carefully selected each piece of clothing for runs, down to his merino wool socks, and even formed his friendships based on his passion.

He organized and ran the Thursday Night Trail Races group, an ultramarathon running group in Columbia, for 10 years and Sunday Morning Ultra Training, another running group in Columbia, and has trained many people for ultramarathons.

At 53, Shawn is now having to reinvent how he sees himself and his life’s work.

FINISH LINE

In March 2025, Shawn quit a 50K race at mile nine because he couldn’t breathe. After getting COVID four times, Shawn had developed COPD, making it almost impossible for him to run like he used to.

“I haven’t been doing that right now, and I’ve been depressed,” Shawn says,
tearing up. He has been on a few small slow runs, but he always feels sick afterward. “I just can’t breathe. So I have a lung capacity; it’s just that it’s in my bronchial tubes,” Shawn says. He now has to keep an inhaler in his pocket. “There’s chronic inflammation, and so I choke on my own air.”

While he battles the symptoms of COPD, he has been making an effort to aid others in their sobriety by being a sponsor and sharing his story. Shawn still attends sobriety meetings and has a sponsor himself. Despite struggling with his new reality without running, he says he hasn’t considered drinking or using drugs since the day he decided to get sober.

Instead of running, Shawn, with a day job as an HVAC sales associate, now spends most of his free time hiking or biking, but he hasn’t completely given up the idea of running; in fact, he still daydreams of ways he can compete in ultramarathon races, such as running slower but taking less time at aid stations. “I’m just trying to get creative with a way. If I can still do this, it might look different,” he says.

“There’s fear attached to that because I’ve attached so much of my identity to running that it’s kind of like, who am I going to be?” Shawn says. “I am more than just a runner, and I know that, but it’s been such a big part of my life, and it’s probably saved my life, so I’m having a hard time letting go of that, and I’m not even sure if I should. But maybe that’s what’s next for me.”

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This article was originally printed in the March/April 2026 issue of Missouri Life.