About 1,800 miles away in Washington, D.C. on Friday morning, Kenneth Anderlitch laced up his running shoes and set his sights on San Antonio.
Anderlitch, 36, will spend the next several weeks running roughly 35 miles per day across six states from the nation’s capital to raise money for a first-of-its-kind addiction recovery program in San Antonio.
“It may be a big run for me, it may be a big run for other people, but … the mission is bigger than this run,” Anderlitch told the San Antonio Report on Thursday as he prepared to disembark.
He wants to spread awareness around addiction recovery, “show other communities what they might be missing” and inspire other cities to start their own recovery programs.
Anderlitch hopes to raise at least $90,000 — or $50 per mile — for the new Families in Recovery program through Run Ken Run.
Families in Recovery
Through a partnership of Haven for Hope, Pay it Forward SA and Lifetime Recovery, Families in Recovery will allow parents and guardians to stay with their children during addiction treatment.
Currently, children are not allowed to stay in treatment facilities in the area, and that can be a barrier for parents seeking recovery, said Hamilton Barton, vice president of engagement and philanthropy at Lifetime Recovery, the largest nonprofit residential substance abuse treatment facility in the region.
“That’s why, oftentimes, they don’t even access treatment — there’s nowhere for their kids to go” besides foster care, Barton said.
Currently, Lifetime Recovery’s comprehensive treatment services of substance use disorders are only available for men in its 94-bed facility. But in May, the nonprofit will open a 48-bed facility for women. Lifetime Recovery will then welcome women from Haven for Hope, the city’s largest homeless shelter and resource hub, freeing up 10-12 rooms for parents and children within Pay it Forward’s program on Haven’s campus.
Pay it Forward, a separate nonprofit, operates the dormitory that provides specialized care and programming for addiction recovery.
Anderlitch, a former Haven resident who struggled with addiction, is now eight years sober and works at Haven as a campus life senior supervisor — meaning he works directly with residents and manages a team of staff who do the same.
Haven for Hope is serving a record number of families right now, officials said. There are 149 family households on campus and 330 children are temporarily calling Haven home. About 22% of clients self-report struggling with a substance use disorder — and Haven suspects this number is probably much higher.
The Road to Recovery
In 2022, Anderlitch ran 840 miles across Texas for Pay it Forward SA, raising $56,897 and burning through 14 pairs of shoes. His journey was made into a documentary by filmmaker Adam Dusnebury.
“I feel strongly about giving back to those who helped me when I needed it the most, Anderlitch said in a news release. “I wish my mom would have found help and healing and was with us today. Her memory keeps me motivated and I hope we will help many families with this new program.”
His mother died of an overdose when he was 18.
While Anderlitch shied away Thursday from taking credit for the idea behind the Families in Recovery idea, Barton corrected the record.
“Ken came to me a year ago, and he said, ‘I want to run for a program where moms and dads can stay with their kids during treatment,'” Barton said.
As children, Anderlitch and his brother were often separated from their mother while she got treatment for addiction. “They never got to participate in the therapeutic process with her, and they never had the support,” Barton said.
There are a few treatment facilities across Texas that allow children to live with their mothers in recovery, but none in San Antonio and none that extend to fathers.
“We know that there’s going to be some dads that need that,” Barton said. So he reached out to Haven for Hope and Pay it Forward SA leadership and they created Families in Recovery.
From DC to SA
The run from Washington, D.C. to San Antonio is more than double the path Anderlitch took from El Paso to Louisiana two years ago.
“I can guarantee that there’s other runners that can run twice and three times as long as this distance,” he said Thursday. “To me, it’s not so much [about the] run as it is the impact that it can cause for people that need this.”
He started running about seven years ago, but started doing longer runs in 2020.
Running allowed him to “decompress or disconnect from society,” in a productive way, Anderlitch said. “You can use running as a tool or coping skill to mitigate some of the noise that you have In your life, whether it’s relationships or it’s your professional life … whatever it is, they all come with stress and strains.”
And — barring the optional costs of fancy shoes and professional running gear — it’s basically free, he noted. “You just go out there and just get outside and catch a couple miles.”
While running has helped with his recovery, he’s well aware that it can be a double-edged sword and become an addiction in itself.
Whether it’s drugs, alcohol, food, social media, “anybody can use those things to the full extent, and then realize it’s taken over their life. It may not seem that you’re hurting anybody, but in reality you’re hurting yourself.”
So he and the people in his recovery circle try to balance and support that, he said.
He’s also not taking the journey alone. His support team will follow him in an RV and other vehicles to provide rest stops, nutrition and physical therapy along the way. He’ll also be accompanied by a documentary crew and will post updates on his journey to Instagram.
The entire trip is expected to take about six weeks — but Anderlitch isn’t pressuring himself.
“[I’m in the] headspace of being able to look out for what’s what’s really important, which is knowing that this is only a temporary thing,” he said. “Whether I finished it or not, it’s got to finish sometime.”
The run has been hyped up, but the hype will die down and Anderlitch wants to maintain the integrity of his recovery. “I always need to remember where I came from and what got me here in the first place.”
Whenever he gets back, he added, “I hope my couch is waiting for me.”
