8 DECEMBER 4-10, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | to come help with the search. He worked at a gym, and told his boss that the missing hiker was his cousin so he could leave. He says he spent about a month up on the mountain, working alongside National Guard units and search-and-rescue teams, digging through snow for a kid he’d never met. Tice’s remains weren’t found until the following summer. “That was really where my passion was,” Liberato says. The moun- tains, not the cage. He tried to pivot to becom- ing a fl ight nurse — something that blended adrenaline, ser- vice and the outdoors. But right before he committed to college, the old dream grabbed him by the throat. He took another fight, ob- tained his pro card...and then got hurt almost immediately. Liberato ruptured a quad- riceps muscle forty seconds into a tune-up match he thought he’d cruise through. The injury joined a list that al- ready included a broken spine, multiple knee surgeries and a reconstructed shoulder, all wrestling and training injuries that had been building up since high school. He was done. The difference now was who he was see- ing to help heal his head. Liberato had shifted from the sports psychologist he’d started seeing at twelve, who had worked to focus his obsession with physical training, to an “ecopsycholo- gist” who specialized in therapy blended with nature. She recommended “medicine work,” or MDMA and psilocybin journeys. He scheduled his fi rst MDMA session to sharpen his purpose for the fi ght. Instead, he showed up on crutches after a tune-up fi ght he never should’ve taken. Liberato spent hours in that MDMA ses- sion wailing in his therapist’s arms, grieving the identity he’d carried since childhood: the MMA fi ghter he now understood he wouldn’t be. It felt like a fi rst heartbreak. He wasn’t new to psychedelics. In high school, he’d eaten an eighth of mushrooms, decided they weren’t working and smoked weed to try to sleep, only to watch his bed dis- solve into a raft and his dog morph into a snake in dark water. No set. No setting. Just terror. He stayed away from mushrooms for years. The fi rst MDMA experience and result- ing work with his therapist were the oppo- site. They did two MDMA journeys, then two psilocybin journeys. MDMA was the softer landing, but the mushrooms went deeper. After the fi rst MDMA session, Liberato felt a classic “helper” pull, with something telling him I need to do this for other people. The next day, he enrolled in Hakomi training, a body-centered psychotherapy program he’s now been in for years. Liberato began weaving mindfulness into the coaching he was already doing. As he worked with athletes, he saw that some were carrying trauma of their own — and that psychedelics might help. Slowly, he started braiding the medicine work into his training. Away From a Bad Relationship, Toward a New Program Running didn’t arrive with a training plan; it came as an escape route. During the COVID lockdowns, Liberato was stuck in what he calls an unhealthy, toxic relationship. Trips to the store were the only reason to leave the house. So he started running there. There was a liquor store seven miles away. He’d run there, buy booze and walk home drinking, numbing himself. Those slogs built a base he didn’t yet understand. After that, he tried one last time to take fi ghting seriously. That’s when the quad popped. In the fog of pain, he decided he needed to ask his legs to do something new. A day and a half after the injury, he signed up for the Black Canyon Ultra, a 60K race through Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, to be held six months later. He’d barely trained and finished near the back. Seven months later, he ran a 40-miler and did better. Then he jumped to 100 miles. Liberato didn’t win, but he proved he belonged out there. But after that LSD aid station at mile 75, running stopped being cross-training and became the main act. Road to the Den, 500 Miles To pay bills through the iden- tity shift, Liberato coached at the same fl uorescent-lit fi tness studios he now criti- cizes. Eventually, he landed at a shared studio in down- town Colorado Springs to teach strength, mobility and martial arts. But what he was chasing didn’t quite fi t: ecstatic dance, microdose movement workshops, drum circles. The other coaches weren’t interested, and their relationships fell apart. His clients quickly stepped up, however, pooling money to buy him equip- ment and offering warehouse space and free rent for a year. They didn’t just like Liberato’s programming: They believed in what he was building. That’s how the Den was born. A gym in Manitou Springs that operates as a commu- nity center for people doing deep self-work, the Den teaches strength and conditioning as well as ELDOA, which involves long, intense postures meant to shake loose stored tension. There are barefoot hikes, primal movement, even sumo wrestling. Most members have one thing in common: They’re doing “medi- cine work,” or something adjacent, and don’t feel like they fi t in their old lives. Liberato knows the question is coming: Is taking psychedelics a performance-en- hancing act worthy of dis- qualifi cation, or could it be soon? He thinks the answer is yes, but not because regula- tors suddenly believe LSD or psilocybin create a meaning- ful competitive edge. “I see it as just another barrier that our government can place around psychedelics,” he says, as a way to tighten ac- cess and reinforce taboo. Mainstream sports will drift one way toward stricter bans, he envisions, while “enhanced” competitions like the nascent Enhanced Games move the other direc- tion, openly courting athletes who are breaking records outside traditional rule sets. Liberato says he and his train- ing partners are “crossing our fi ngers we can keep doing what we’re doing.” As his gym was gaining momentum, psy- chedelics were pushing other dominoes for Liberato. At an underground retreat center in Colo- rado, Liberato’s mentor guided a ceremony for a man named Fernando Gonzalez, who came out of it wanting to live in a Korean monastery. Gonzalez eventually returned with cameras for a planned documentary about psychedelics. When he heard someone was training to run from Manitou Springs to Moab on acid, he knew he’d found his topic — and personal challenge. The running route kept expanding as Liberato added dirt and removed pavement. It sat around 455 miles when Gonzalez pointed out that “500” hits harder. That meant adding another ultramarathon’s worth to the route. “Fuck it,” Liberato said. “I can run 500 miles.” Liberato left on September 22 with a small crew and a psychedelics protocol of his own: not one massive hit of LSD, but a series of small ones, thirty to forty micro- grams at a time, trickled throughout the day. By night, he might have 200 micrograms in his system, riding the edge of what he calls “that journey space.” The run is now complete, fi nished just over ten days after its start. The fi lm, Dante, is in post-production. Now Liberato is ex- plaining the adventure to people who’ve never considered dropping acid at mile 75, much less day ten. Couchmilk and the Keys Psychedelics Hand You While the fi lm took shape, another thread twisted into a psychedelic-centric business. Couchmilk started as a nonsense phrase from a psychedelic journey, shorthand in Liberato’s circle for the ineffable magic of psychedelics. The serious turn came when two fi ghters he coached took psilocybin before their bouts. Both won, decisively. Days later, they crewed Liberato through his 100-miler. The group realized they had something unusual in athletes perform- ing well while openly experimenting with mushrooms. A tech-savvy friend saw an opportunity: What if there were a platform where athletes could track their training and medicine use together? Couchmilk became a data-driven app. Athletes log workouts alongside dosing, add- ing information about what they took, how much, when and what happened afterward. Patterns emerge, and so does a core insight: No two bodies respond the same way. There’s an AI coach, but that’s secondary. The real point is helping people learn their own systems. In Liberato’s language, Couchmilk ath- letes are “superathletes,” or people who perform hard and live emotionally literate lives devoted to something deeper than a belt or title. Sometimes that devotion pulls them out of the ring entirely. “A lot of fighters have daddy issues,” says Liberato, who’s now 27. “Once they real- ize they don’t have to do some- thing to please their father, fi ghting doesn’t really make as much sense anymore.” The coach of many colors doesn’t push psychedelics as a fi x, but if you keep doing what you’ve always done, he points out, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always gotten. “People look at psychedelics as a way to fi x things,” he says. “It doesn’t open any doors for you, but psychedelics can give you a whole bunch of different keys, and you can decide which doors you want to open.” The work — long runs, gym sessions, building an app, making a fi lm — is every- thing that came after those doors opened. Email the author at [email protected]. Running on Air continued from page 7 Dante Liberato believes psychedelics like MDMA and psilocybin can unlock something special in athletes. Liberato with friend Johnny Ramos on his 500-mile run. JORDAN BA ABS JORDAN BA ABS
