The Code: A Guide to Health and Human Performance

Running won't outrun your trauma, and therapist Don Harris explains why the fastest people at the finish line are often the ones still carrying the most weight.
 
Don Harris has built a practice and a run club around the same idea: movement helps, but connection does the deeper work. As a therapist who works with both teenagers and adults, he's learned that the question "What's wrong with you?" rarely gets anyone anywhere. "What happened to you?" does. That shift shows up everywhere in this conversation, from how he counsels students to how he built Embrace the Pace, the Denver run club he founded around self-love, wellness, community, and movement rather than pace times.
 
What happens when you stop treating exercise as an escape hatch and start treating it as one piece of a bigger picture? Don and Andrew dig into that question from a few angles, comparing the pull of running with others against the clarity that comes from running alone, and asking why the best ideas seem to show up mid-run. If you had to shop around for a therapist the way you'd shop for any other provider, would you settle for the first opening on the schedule, or would you hold out for someone you actually connect with?
 
The conversation closes on Embrace the Pace's upcoming Run for Denver Day, a free community event on July 20th built to bring Denver's run club scene and wider wellness community together in one place, no matter your club or your pace.
 
Quotes
"Life happened to you. And because life happened to you in a certain way, you're navigating it in the way that you navigate it." (18:41 | Don Harris)
"When are you going to stop running from it and start running towards it? Because it's going to continue to chase you because our body stores everything, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we talk about it or not, our body is storing all the experiences that happens to us. And while we're running from things, more experiences are happening to us. And so then it becomes the question of do you want to live a heavy life or a light life?" (21:24 | Don Harris)
"Don't just go to a therapist just because they're a therapist. It's 80% connection, relationship rapport, 20% modality of whatever that therapist is using. It doesn't matter how good the therapist is, whatever they specialize in, can you connect with them?" (23:47 | Don Harris)
"This version of yourself has value. It has meaning, it is worth something. And I say when you know your worth, then you add tax to that." (53:31 | Don Harris)
"I always tell people we start and end at the same place, no matter how fast you get there... The pace doesn't matter. You got up, you moved your body, you accomplished something. That is a win." (54:20 | Don Harris)
Links
 
Connect with Don Harris:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamdondreharris/ 
 
Embrace the Pace: https://www.instagram.com/embracethepace.runclub/ 
 
DonDre 'Don' Harris, MSW, SWC, is a trauma-informed therapist, school social worker, and community leader passionate about helping people reconnect with themselves and others. Drawing from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), mindfulness, and strengths-based approaches, he creates spaces where authenticity, healing, and growth can thrive. 
Outside of the therapy room, Don is an ultrarunner and founder of Embrace the Pace: Run Club, where he uses movement as a tool for building community, resilience, and belonging. He believes that every mile, like every step in healing, is an opportunity to embrace the journey rather than rush the destination. Through his work, Don is committed to making mental health and the outdoors more accessible, inclusive, and transformative for all.
 
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What happens to your identity the day you can no longer do the thing you built it on?
 
Dr. Andrew Fix reflects on a recent 5K to explore a question most people avoid. Are you measuring your worth against a version of yourself that no longer exists? He breaks down why running a race and comparing the result to an old personal record ignores everything that has changed along the way, from injuries and surgeries to the demands of raising a family. A little perspective changes the whole picture.
 
The conversation moves beyond running into something bigger. Why do so many people introduce themselves through a job title or a sport they used to play? Dr. Fix shares an analogy he loves, building your identity on a single role or activity is like standing on a football. It feels solid until the moment it isn't.
 
He also calls out a pattern he sees constantly in his practice. People say they used to play softball or throw the ball with their kids, but their shoulder or knee stops them now. Is that really the injury talking, or is it easier to hide behind an old identity than to do the work required to reclaim it?
 
This episode is a challenge to stop living through who you were and start paying attention to who you're becoming. What would change if you answered "What do you do?" with something other than your job?
 
Quotes
"Are you still living in the past, holding on to the things that you used to do and the person that you used to be? Or are you focused on who you are today and the person that you're becoming?" (00:34 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
"We should lead with who we are and what we're becoming now. And we should also not try to have our identity wrapped up necessarily in the things that we do." (04:07 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
"If you try to build your life foundation on top of a football, like on a football, that is a very wobbly foundation to try and stand on." (04:27 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
"If your identity is wrapped up in I am this thing that I do, I am a football player, then that's going to be a very difficult thing when that is stripped away from you, however that happens." (05:32 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
"That's also one of these same things where you're holding on to an identity of something that you're not, in a way, potentially because you're afraid of the truth." (07:28 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
 
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Ben Braverman dropped from 240 pounds and a couple of prescriptions to a sub-3:40 marathon, and he says the real transformation happened somewhere between his ears.
 
Ben joins Dr. Andrew Fix to talk about what actually changes when someone moves from the far end of the wellness spectrum toward something closer to optimization. His story starts with running for beginners in its truest form: a guy on a treadmill who couldn't run a mile, slowly building toward a marathon a few years later. The physical numbers are real: weight loss, a faster marathon, and blood pressure readings that finally started moving in the right direction. But Ben keeps circling back to something harder to quantify. He calls it mental clarity, the sense that decisions got easier, stress got more manageable, and his work and relationships improved almost as a side effect of taking care of his body.
 
What does it actually feel like to operate without a constant mental fog? And how much of that fog do most people simply accept as normal because they've never known anything else?
 
The two also dig into why personal growth rarely moves in a straight line. Ben's second year of running was slower than his first, and a coach's advice to celebrate small wins kept him moving forward when the personal records stopped coming. Andrew frames health less as a finish line and more as seasons of pushing and pulling back, a pattern borrowed from how elite athletes train and recover. Underneath all of it sits one quiet but stubborn idea: consistency, not intensity, is what actually moves people from the left side of the spectrum to the right. The conversation touches on nutrition, sleep, and the discomfort that seems to accompany any real change, landing on a simple idea: the gap between feeling okay and feeling genuinely well might be smaller than most people think.
 
Quotes
"For someone that's never really felt fit, you're always a little tired because you're eating poorly. You're always a little fatigued." (16:07 | Ben Braverman)
"You don't need to be running forty, fifty, sixty miles a week, lifting four to five times a week, cold plunging five times a week, hot yoga three times a week…If you get out there and you run for 30 minutes four times a week, and getting some resistance training two times a week, you probably will see changes if you're on that left side of the spectrum." (23:41 | Ben Braverman)
"If you don't have a coach, you should. I would give it a shot. If you're trying to get faster or just trying to accomplish something, it's helpful to have that expert." (50:42 | Ben Braverman)
“I feel like I process stress better. And I think that's a byproduct of mental clarity. Being able to process the down days." (43:41 | Ben Braverman)
"If you know somebody that's struggling with fitness, like I was on the left side of the spectrum, send them this pod, because you can transform even much later in life." (53:55 | Ben Braverman)
Connect with Ben Braverman:
Connect with Ben on LinkedIn 
The In Good Order Podcast with Ben Braverman
 
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The real test of motivation begins in the morning when life gives you another reason to quit.
 
Motivation, drive, and aging all meet in one honest question. What keeps you moving when your body feels different, the news is hard, or the next step feels heavier than usual? In this episode of The Code, Dr. Andrew Fix reflects on a conversation with a client who felt discouraged after receiving difficult medical updates, and that conversation led to a larger discussion about resilience and the deeper reasons we keep showing up for our health.
 
Andrew talks about the difference between outside pressure and internal drive. A coach, a goal, or a desired outcome can help for a while, but lasting motivation usually comes from something more personal. Maybe you want to stay active with your kids or grandkids. Maybe you want to travel with your spouse. Maybe you want to age with strength, independence, and energy. What reason feels strong enough to bring you back on the days you would rather stop?
 
This episode reframes exercise as part of protecting quality of life. Strength, mobility, reaction time, muscle mass, and resilience all shape how fully we get to live as we age. Healthspan matters as much as lifespan, and progress can be small without being meaningless. The goal is to keep taking the next step toward the life you still want to participate in.
 
Quotes
“What is there as your guiding light, your true north on your compass? What keeps you motivated to wake up the next day and keep going?” (02:02 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
“If you can find what we call an internal motivator, something that is within you, something that you are interested in, something that you want, as opposed to something external…That's what's going to help you get there.” (03:17 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
“I ask you to come back to deeper meaning, what is the why? What is the purpose that you're doing this for?” (07:20 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
“We're not trying to reach the top of the staircase in one step. We're just trying to reach the next step. And the next step in the next step.” (10:59 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
“Whatever you have to do today that is challenging you, I hope you think deep about what motivates you to keep going and use that encouragement to help you push through.” (11:18 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
 
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Red and near-infrared light may be the most underestimated recovery tool in your environment, and the science behind what it actually does inside your cells is far more compelling than the wellness industry gives it credit for.
 
Scott Chaverri didn't set out to build one of the leading red light therapy companies in the country. He was a burnt-out caregiver looking for anything that would help him sleep and function after two years of watching his son fight cancer. He found red light therapy in 2017 and noticed real changes. When the price of adding more panels shocked him, he decided to build his own. Mito Red Light did a million dollars in sales its first year.
 
The science behind photobiomodulation is worth understanding. Red and near-infrared wavelengths penetrate several centimeters into the body and act directly on the mitochondria, accelerating ATP production and triggering downstream effects that include better circulation, reduced inflammation, and a meaningful boost in cellular melatonin. A study on elite female basketball players found serum melatonin levels rose 67% after a single 30-minute session, which lines up with the number one piece of feedback Mito receives from customers: better sleep. Scott's broader argument reframes the whole conversation too. Modern humans spend roughly 93% of their time indoors, and much of what red light therapy accomplishes is correcting a light deficiency most people don't know they have. For the biohacking crowd chasing marginal gains, that reframe matters.
 
Dr. Fix brings a clinician's perspective throughout, connecting photobiomodulation to the laser and dry needling work at PhysioRoom and asking the questions practitioners actually want answered: dosing, distance, timing, device selection, and when a panel outperforms a mask. The episode also gets into the single biggest reason people return their devices without ever giving them a real shot, and it has nothing to do with the technology.
 
Quotes
“Modern humans have very indoor lifestyles and they're sunlight deficient." (08:44 | Scott Chaverri)
"If the cells have more energy at their disposal, they can do their jobs better. And so theoretically, any cell that has mitochondria, which is every cell in the human body except red blood cells, has the potential to benefit from exposure to these wavelengths of light due to that increased ATP production." (11:36 | Scott Chaverri)
"We're spending 93% of our time indoors. And so when they correct the deficiency, they notice that they're feeling better, they sleep better, whatever the case is." (09:01 | Scott Chaverri)
"We just giving it a little bit more energy so it can do its job. It knows what to do. Just have to give it what it needs." (21:50 | Scott Chaverri)
"The sun rises. We're meant to get copious amounts of red and infrared light at dawn. It's the reason why the sky is red at sunrise and sunset, because that's the only wavelengths that are reaching us. And so that is like the signal to wake up." (1:01:40 | Scott Chaverri)
Connect with Scott Chaverri:
Visit The Mito Red Light Website 
Red Light Therapy (@mitoredlightofficial)
 
Scott worked for several Fortune 500 companies, in the business services, medical device, financial services and ecommerce industries. Having dealt with health challenges in childhood and early adulthood, Scott has always been passionate about all things health and wellness. Constantly learning, tinkering and evolving, his goal is to build Mito Red Light Inc into a preeminent health and wellness company empowering people with tools and information to optimize their performance and maximize their health spans.  
 
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That tight hamstring you've been stretching might be your nervous system asking for something else entirely.
 
When pain shows up in one place, the source is often somewhere else. Dr. Andrew Fix walks through a real patient case from Physio Room where a woman who was experiencing persistent pain in her hamstring had been doing what most people do: stretching it out and hoping mobility work would eventually help. The sciatic nerve originates from the lowest nerve roots of the lumbar spine, and when those roots get irritated, the nerve signals the hamstring to hold protective tension. What feels like tightness is the nervous system protecting itself. Stretching works against that response.
 
In many cases like this one, the root cause is a lack of spinal stability. Without adequate muscular control around the pelvis and lumbar spine, gravity loads the vertebral joints and compresses the nerve roots every time you sit or stand. Dr. Fix explains how positional testing revealed exactly this pattern: her hamstring tested pain-free lying down but reproduced symptoms seated. When she was cued to engage her deep core before repeating the painful test, symptoms dropped roughly 70% without a single hands-on intervention. The muscle was the same. The spinal load was not.
 
How often are people chasing mobility and flexibility when the real missing ingredient is stability and control? Dr. Fix makes the case for thorough assessment before any treatment begins, and offers a clear signal to watch for: if a practitioner skips the diagnostic work and goes straight to treating what you describe, it is worth getting a second opinion.
 
Quotes
"Nerves are like electrical cords. They don't enjoy being tugged on." (04:25 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
"Your body's trying to have this protective mechanism, we're trying to stretch and take it away, and we're not necessarily helping ourselves out. We're temporarily relieving symptoms, but we're not addressing the real issue at hand." (04:40 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
"When you have a lack of stability, what you cannot do is you cannot stretch it away. Because stretching doesn't give you stability. Stability is like strength and control, your ability to control the joints and the tissues while you're going through movement." (05:20 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
"It hurts when there's no stability being created for the spine. But it doesn't hurt or doesn't hurt nearly as much when we do create some stability for the spine." (11:17 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
"They shouldn't be just starting to treat something before they've really done a thorough assessment to know what they need to treat in the first place." (13:54 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
 
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The secret to staying consistent might be hiding in your backyard.
 
Most people quit their fitness routines not because they lack discipline, but because progress is invisible in the short term. We live in a world wired for instant gratification, and when weeks of hard work in the gym produce no visible results, that invisibility is defeating. Yard work offers a useful contrast. Pull a weed, see the bare ground. Mow a strip of lawn, see exactly what you've covered. The feedback is immediate, and that immediacy does something powerful for motivation.
 
Dr. Andrew Fix uses that observation as a jumping-off point for a bigger question: how do you stay motivated when the progress you're working toward won't show up for weeks or months? His answer has less to do with willpower than with learning to notice smaller signals along the way. What went right today, even if the day itself felt like a loss? What did you learn from the thing that didn't work out? The people who eventually reach their goals tend to be the ones who get good at asking those questions rather than waiting for a big win to validate the effort.
 
The episode is a good reminder that consistency isn't a personality trait. It's a practice, and part of that practice is training yourself to find evidence that the work is worth continuing, even when the scoreboard doesn't show it yet.
 
Quotes
"It takes a lot of time, weeks, months of consistency to really be able to sometimes see with your own eyes the progress that's happening. That can be very defeating sometimes." (04:35 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
"What happens is they keep hopping from thing to thing, fad to fad, diet to diet, new workout plan to new workout plan. And you never stick with something long enough to actually see the results take shape." (05:02 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
"Even on days that are not going according to plan, are there little things that worked out?" (07:10| Dr. Andrew Fix)
"The people who are going to succeed and the people who are going to be in a farther place at the end of the day are going to have failed more times than the people who never got to that place." (07:55 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
"Just keep falling and failing forward, and we'll eventually make it to where we want to go." (09:05 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
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When the question every injured runner is afraid to ask, "Do I have to stop?",  finally gets a straight answer, it turns out the real story has less to do with the pain itself and more to do with everything the runner wasn't tracking.
 
Dr. Andrew Fix sits down with Dr. Vikash Sharma, DPT, founder of Perfect Stride Physical Therapy in New York, to talk through managing running injuries, avoiding stress fractures, and building a smart return to running after time off.
 
Stress fractures get missed more often than they should, and the clue is usually hiding in a two-minute conversation about nutrition and training load. Has your mileage gone up? Has your food intake kept pace? For a lot of runners, the answer to that second question is no.
 
For soft tissue injuries, Sharma's approach is less about stopping and more about finding a sustainable baseline, trimming the run, filling the rest with cross-training, and using that window to build the strength and mobility that likely broke down first.
 
The conversation also covers training load management, deload weeks, why most runners' strength work stopped producing results long ago, and what a real return-to-run progression actually looks like.
 
Find Dr. Vikash Sharma at @vikashsharma_dpt on Instagram or at perfectstridept.com. His clinical education platform for coaches and clinicians is at runningforlifeeducation.
 
 
Quotes
"Runners run. That's what they want to do, and they'll keep running until the wheels fall off." (09:48 | Dr. Vikash Sharma)
"If two months ago you were running X amount of mileage and now you're up 75% from that, but your nutrition hasn't really changed at all, and now you're starting to get signs and symptoms that make me think you have a bone stress injury, a hundred percent we're shutting it down." (10:39| Dr. Vikash Sharma)
"Just like training their musculoskeletal system, just like training their nervous system and their brain — we got to train your gut as well." (22:13 | Dr. Vikash Sharma)
"Your low days need to be low so that your high days can truly be high days." (32:53 | Dr. Vikash Sharma)
"There's always a story behind this human. There is a human in front of you. Just get back to that human element and dig — a lot of your questions will get answered the more they're talking to you." (54:23 | Dr. Vikash Sharma)
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Perfect Stride Physical Therapy
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Most runners are one bad training week away from an injury they never saw coming, and the way they think about shoes, strength, and recovery is probably making that worse.
 
Dr. Drew Short specializes in working with runners at PhysioRoom, and his approach to running injury recovery starts somewhere most people wouldn't expect: months back in an athlete's training log. The culprit behind most injuries isn't a single bad run. It's accumulated load, under-fueling, or a strength gap that quietly grew until something gave out. When the mechanical picture looks clean, Drew digs deeper, sometimes all the way to blood work and nutritional consults. Multiple tendon issues flaring up in different parts of the body at once? That's a systemic story, not a mechanical one.
 
The calf conversation is worth sitting with. Runners stretch it religiously and almost never strengthen it the way running actually demands. The soleus does significant work during each stride, but only when the knee is bent, which is almost never how people train it. A calf that always feels tight is probably asking for load, not length.
 
On the trail running vs. road running question, the differences go deeper than terrain. Strength demands, stability requirements, and pacing strategy all shift in ways that catch road runners off guard when they head onto the trails. And carbon-plated shoes? Both Drew and Dr. Ficks agree they have a place, but earning them matters more than buying them.
 
Quotes
"The downside to under-fueling is you're going to hit a brick wall. The downside to over-fueling is maybe a rumbly stomach…I'd rather be on that end of the spectrum." (14:58 | Dr. Drew Short)
"You might meet the rep scheme on a calf raise, but whenever you start making it more ballistic and you start using the tendon more, it doesn't like that. The rate of fire is just a lot slower on that side." (25:50 | Dr. Drew Short)
"Stiffer tendons or more robust tendons — that's just free energy. If you're able to use that elasticity like a rubber band whenever you hit the ground, that's less that the muscles are having to push off." (33:19 | Dr. Drew Short)
"If your calf always feels like it needs to be stretched, honestly, your tendon probably needs some load. You probably do need to be doing some heavy slow resistance through that tendon. Otherwise, you just keep stretching it all day every day." (34:32 | Dr. Drew Short)
"If I'm doing a long effort and I can still breathe just through my nose, I know I'm gonna be fine at hour three, hour four." (48:26 | Dr. Drew Short)
Connect with Dr. Drew Short:https://www.instagram.com/thenamesdrew/
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Sleep isn't a luxury you negotiate with; it's the biological foundation every other health habit is built on, and most people are getting far less of it than they think.
 
Dr. Andrew Fix revisits one of the show's most foundational episodes for Better Sleep Month, and the timing feels personal. A new baby at home has a way of clarifying just how much everything falls apart when sleep does. Drawing from Matthew Walker's landmark book Why We Sleep, this episode makes a compelling case that sleep deprivation isn't just fatigue. It's a direct line to cancer, cardiovascular disease, dementia, weight gain, and a compromised immune system.
 
Here's a question worth sitting with: if you went to bed at 10 and woke up at 6, did you actually get eight hours of sleep? Probably not. Time in bed and time asleep are not the same thing, and that gap is where most people are quietly losing ground.
 
Dr. Fix gets practical without being prescriptive. A consistent sleep schedule, a cooler and darker room, cutting caffeine earlier than feels necessary, and keeping alcohol away from bedtime are the kinds of shifts that build real resilience over time. He also draws a connection that often gets overlooked in fitness culture: sleep is where recovery actually happens, and poor sleep throws off the hormones that regulate hunger, making weight management an uphill battle no matter how clean your diet is or how early you get to the gym.
 
What would change about your daily habits if you treated sleep as seriously as your workouts or your nutrition? That's the real question this episode leaves you with.
 
Quotes
“I think it's a shock to nobody that sleep is the most important thing in our lives. If we don't get enough of it, pretty much every major function of our body is going to suffer.” (02:37 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
"The amount of time that you spend in bed that you think you are asleep does not equal or correlate to the amount of time that you actually sleep." ( 06:27 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
“I do have a change in my sleep quality when I cut that caffeine out earlier. So, avoiding caffeine and nicotine, in theory, will help with your sleep quality.” (13:52 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
“You want your brain to be planning to go to bed when you get in bed. You want your body's cycle to be just so in tune with, ‘Oh, this is where I come when I want to go to sleep.’” (20:19 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
“All of the professional athletes that we watch on television and whatnot, I can tell you that they are putting a much higher emphasis on sleep than we do in our normal lives.” (31:59 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
 
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