Speaker Bio:

Andy Glaze is an ultrarunner, firefighter, paramedic, battalion chief, and the author of Smile, Or You’re Doing It Wrong: A Journey from Rock Bottom to Redemption. What makes this conversation resonate is his refusal to flatten any of it, including the recent humbling of realizing that running, his medicine for so long, has stopped quieting the PTSD the way it used to.

Talk Title:

Mental Health Is a Performance Skill

Talk Summary:

Mental health is not a personality trait or a private struggle. It is a trainable skill – one that can be developed, strengthened, and maintained the same way we train physical readiness. Drawing from my career as a Battalion Chief and paramedic and my experience running 100 to 300-mile ultramarathons, I want to make a practical argument for why consistency, habit formation, and daily anchors build long-term psychological durability – and why that matters in high-stress professions and everyday life.

This isn’t a clinical talk and it isn’t a therapy session. It’s a framework for building mental strength before crisis hits.