Somewhere on a quiet stretch of road near Olathe, Colorado, Dante Liberato sat down and wondered if he had finally gone too far.
By that point, he had already run more than 240 miles. His legs were wrecked, his mind was foggy, and the desert stretched endlessly ahead. Whether it was exhaustion, emotion, or the subtle influence of psychedelics, something forced him to stop.
“I felt absolutely miserable in that moment,” Liberato recalled later. “I was realizing how much further I had to go, and how much longer it was going to take.”
This moment — raw, human, and unfiltered — sits at the heart of Dante, a forthcoming documentary that follows Liberato as he runs 500 miles from Colorado Springs to Moab in just 11 days while experimenting with psychedelic microdosing. But the film isn’t really about running. And it isn’t necessarily about drugs either.
It’s about transformation. About listening to the body. About discovering what happens when you stop running away from yourself — and start running toward something deeper.
From Cage Fighter to Long-Distance Runner
Dante Liberato didn’t grow up dreaming of ultramarathons. For years, his world revolved around combat sports. He was a professional mixed-martial-arts fighter with ambitions of stepping into the UFC octagon. Pain was normal. Violence was the job.
Then, in 2021, everything collapsed.
A ruptured quadricep during a fight ended his career, adding to a long list of serious injuries that already included broken bones and a fractured spine.
“It was the last of a bunch of serious injuries,” Liberato said. “I had broken my spine, broken arms and legs — I’d been through it.”
At the same time, his personal life was unraveling. An unhealthy relationship, a heavy drinking habit, and an identity built entirely around fighting left him unmoored.
One evening, almost by accident, he ran home from a liquor store. Then he did it again. And again. Something clicked.
“I wanted to prove to myself that I was more than a fighter,” he said.
Running became a way out. Not just physically, but psychologically. It offered solitude instead of aggression, endurance instead of dominance.
Psychedelics as Tools, Not Answers
During this transition, Liberato began working with a psychotherapist who introduced him to MDMA-assisted therapy. The experience cracked something open. Other psychedelic substances followed, always in therapeutic or intentional settings.
“When I was a fighter, I was consumed by the thought of hurting people,” he said. “If I was going to become a better human being, I was going to need to find a new way of thinking.”
This perspective is key to understanding both the run and the documentary. Psychedelics weren’t magic shortcuts. They didn’t erase pain or hand over enlightenment.
“My biggest takeaway is that none of these medicines will give you the answers to your problems,” Liberato said. “You have to first go through a process internally of creating a healthy relationship with your environment and your community.”
That philosophy now underpins his work. He runs a Manitou Springs gym called The Den, blending MMA training with mindfulness and emotional awareness — a place some locals affectionately call the “hippy gym.” He also founded Couchmilk, a platform exploring psychedelic-informed recovery and performance for athletes.
The Spark That Lit the Fuse
The idea for the 500-mile run was born during the 2024 Silverheels Trail Run, a 100-mile race in Breckenridge. Around mile 85, Liberato was broken. A friend offered him a psychedelic dose.
The shift was dramatic.
“It brought me out of this hole,” he said. “By the finish I really wanted to keep running.”
That moment planted a question that wouldn’t let go: What role could psychedelics play in endurance, focus, and emotional resilience over long distances? Not in theory — but in lived experience.
To explore it, Liberato dreamed up a bold experiment: run nearly 50 miles a day, every day, for almost two weeks.
Enter the Camera
Around the same time, filmmaker Fernando Gonzalez crossed paths with Liberato at a retreat center. Gonzalez was searching for a subject to anchor his first major film — someone honest, complex, and willing to be seen.
“He was very driven and had this positive energy that made you want to work with him,” Gonzalez said.
What followed was more than a year of filming: training runs, therapy sessions, home life, doubt, ambition, vulnerability. When Liberato finally set off in October 2025, Gonzalez and his crew followed — along with nurses, therapists, pacers, and friends.
“He was going to do something that was supposed to be intimate and personal,” Gonzalez said. “And I hijacked it.”
Eleven Days of Reckoning
The early days felt electric. There was excitement, laughter, momentum. Then fatigue crept in. Tempers flared. Bodies broke down.
Liberato ran between 11 and 14 hours a day, sleeping in campsites at night. He experimented with LSD and psilocybin, sometimes finding clarity and focus — other times discovering anxiety, emotional heaviness, or deep exhaustion.
“I got to a point where it became exhausting taking the medication,” he said. “I would think the psychedelics would help me overcome fatigue, but they’d make me even more tired.”
What emerged instead was a deeper lesson: emotion lives beneath exhaustion.
“I realized that with medicine, there was an emotion hiding behind the fatigue, and I had to learn to let go of that.”
Sometimes that meant tears. Sometimes it meant frustration. Sometimes it meant sitting silently on the side of a road and facing himself without distraction.
“I had to let go of a ton of emotion a few times and just really cry and wail,” he said. “After those sessions, I’d feel a lightning bolt of energy and drive.”
More Than a Running Film
Dante doesn’t offer clean conclusions or simple answers. It shows psychedelics as powerful tools — capable of insight, but also of challenge. It shows suffering not as failure, but as an invitation to listen more closely.
“There is a bridge we are building right now in this country,” Liberato said, “that connects our society and culture with the way things should be as we build a more self-aware society. This documentary is one brick in that bridge.”
Gonzalez echoes that sentiment. Despite losing potential sponsors once psychedelics entered the conversation, he remains committed to careful, responsible storytelling — emphasizing harm reduction, integration, and personal accountability.
“It’s really important that people understand both the benefits and risks,” he said.
The Perfect Ending
After 11 days and 500 miles, Liberato arrived in Moab. The run was complete. The experiment was over. The questions, however, remain open. Exactly how they should be.
“I kept thinking about what would be the perfect ending to my journey,” he said. “Eating an ice cream sandwich was pretty close to it.”
Sometimes, after all the suffering and searching, that’s enough.
Dante is expected to be released in 2026. Until then, its message keeps moving — one step, one breath, one honest conversation at a time.
