Ultra Running Brought Me Back to Life After I Hit Rock Bottom

This story is part of our ongoing “First Steps” series, where we share extraordinary stories of men who transformed their bodies, minds, and lives with a focus on the first steps it took them to get there (because, after all, nothing can change without a first step!). Read all of the stories here.

Below, former millionaire Bill Bradley, 64, tells Men’s Health how going bankrupt in 2005 left him searching for a “new identity” in life—and how working through his pain and discomfort (both literally and figuratively) as an endurance athlete helped him find purpose.

I OPENED MY first video store in Santa Rosa in the ’80s using a bunch of credit cards because nobody would lend me money. Over the next 20 years, Bradley Video grew to 11 stores, it became one of the top independents in the country, and at my peak I was worth around $5 million. Then, in the mid-2000s, physical video stores began to die out, and in November 2005, at the age of 45, I was eventually forced to declare bankruptcy.

It was devastating. My identity was in that store, and had been for 20 years. I went through a divorce at the same time, and I was a mess. My confidence was nothing. I went from speaking at huge conventions to feeling like I was nobody. I went back to work for my dad’s business, doing sales, and I couldn’t even look people in the eye. I was broken.

But I’m not very good at quitting. I knew I needed a new identity, and I remembered how proud I felt after doing my first Ironman-distance race. I used to be a track athlete in high school, and I kept training, averaging around 10 hours of running a week before the bankruptcy. I’d been talking about doing a 50-mile run for a long time, but I wasn’t sure if I could finish one, and I was worried what people would think if I failed again. Five months after I went bankrupt, a buddy called me and told me about the Ruth Anderson Memorial 50-Mile Run in San Francisco. He said, “Bill, you’ve been talking about doing a 50-miler forever. The perfect one is tomorrow.”

At this point, I was only running around three hours a week, and this was not a lot of notice. To make things worse, I had poison oak on my manly parts during all of this. I was in bad shape. But I needed something. My buddy’s dad is a retired doctor, so I got him on the phone, and he told me in no uncertain terms that running 50 miles with poison oak on my privates was a bad, bad idea. I was so depressed, and I went to bed thinking I wasn’t going to do it. Then I woke up at 3 a.m. thinking, what the hell. I set my alarm for 5 a.m., and I went out there and I ran that 50 miles like my life depended on it. Because it did. After I finished, I remember walking down the street standing taller, looking people in the eyes again. I felt like I’d risen from the ashes.

After the 50-mile race, I tried to run 100 miles at the Western States Endurance Run in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It was 105 degrees, I didn’t know how to deal with the heat, I got hyponatremia (an electrolyte imbalance that causes the level of sodium in your blood to become dangerously high), and I didn’t finish. Two months later, I ran the Headlands 100k in Marin County, just north of San Francisco, which felt great. And once you get in with these ultrarunners, you start hearing about other races. My next race was 100 miles in Alaska, which took two attempts to complete, and I actually ended up finishing five hours after the cutoff. I rarely manage anything on the first try! But the more I challenged myself with bigger and harder events—like running the Badwater Basin in Death Valley at the height of summer—I began to notice just how much better I was feeling.

I’ve definitely evolved since then. I have a morning routine now. I’ll start the day with a Wim Hof-style cold plunge, I’ll meditate, do some visualizing. I have a vision wall of my goals, affirmations, and people that inspire me. It’s pretty damn effective. If that kind of thing didn’t work, advertisers wouldn’t spend millions on billboards. I even travel with a rollout version that I’ll tape up in my hotel room before a big race.

I go after all my biggest fears. I’ve climbed Denali, and I have a huge fear of heights and falling. But that’s exactly why I took up mountain climbing. I’ve fallen into a 25-feet crevice. I’ve had frostbite so bad my thumb turned black and I had to go to three doctors until one told me I could keep it. It scares the crap out of me to go back up there and try things again. But I do it.

I’ve tried to swim the English channel five times. On my fifth attempt, I got separated from the boat by a storm. For my sixth time, I went over there in the best shape of my life, but never got a chance because the weather was so bad. That really burned me out, and I gave up on the idea for eight years. Now I’m back training to do it again. I’ve been swimming in San Fransisco Bay for the last six months; no wetsuit, no breaks. Yesterday I swam for an hour in water that was 52 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s the coldest I’ve ever been. I just kept swimming, and I kept saying to myself, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Back when the bankruptcy hit, my dad was calling me every night. I asked him later, “Why were you calling so much?” And he told me that I was so depressed, he was doing a suicide check. I’d been sober for 15 years before that, and people in my life were worried that I’d start drinking again. That’s why I think I went to such extreme lengths to get my confidence back: I’d rather be doing these really painful and difficult things than be numbing myself with alcohol.

And that’s what I’d say to anyone else who’s faced a huge setback and needs to rebuild their confidence. For me it started with a 50-mile run, but it could be anything; it doesn’t have to be athletics. If you’re an actor, you’ve got to start auditioning again. You have to be in the game. When you’re in the arena, when you’re fighting the fight—that’s when you start to feel like yourself again.