The last night Mat Fraser drank alcohol was the night before his senior year of high school. She was 17 years old.
Now, the retired professional CrossFit athlete and five-time CrossFit Games champion shares his sobriety story in a vulnerable youtube video. In the video, the 32-year-old athlete recalls trying alcohol and drugs as early as fourth grade, eventually developing habits in his teens that led him down an unsustainable path.
His wake-up call came when he received another citation for underage drinking at age 17, bringing it home to his father, who was so used to the citation that he didn’t react. Fraser remembers thinking: “I can’t maintain these habits and call myself an elite athlete.”
“I just said right then and there, ‘Okay, I’m not going to touch alcohol again,'” he says.
Fraser says that sobriety became easier once he developed safe and productive habits to replace heavy drinking, forging an identity and personality unaffiliated with alcohol. He was no longer “The Party Guy,” but the guy determined to give it his all in his CrossFit and weightlifting career.
“Having this addictive personality can be a benefit if I’m addicted to things that have a positive outcome,” he says in the video. “I’m not just an alcoholic. I’m an addict. Anything I do, I’m going to do to the extreme.”
But CrossFit not only created a positive outlet for Fraser, it also gave her a ready-made excuse not to drink without having to explain her sobriety.
“It’s very normal that so many competitors just don’t drink because data is available on how much they drink.” affects your recovery and your training the next day,” he says. “So people just assume you’re doing it for health reasons, and I don’t want to explain to every person I come across that, no, I actually stopped drinking when I was 17. years”.
In the video, which documents recovery as part of Fraser’s everyday life, the athlete visits Athletic Brewing Company., a craft brewery that brews non-alcoholic beer. There, Fraser tries a (non-alcoholic) beer flight for the first time.
Fraser also attends a physical recovery group called The Fenix, which is a “safe, sober, active community of peers who support each other every day on the road to recovery.” During her time with the group, Fraser says she doesn’t attend meetings for her substance use disorder as often as she should, but she does stay in touch with a sober community in Vermont, where she first addressed her relationship with the alcohol.
“At this point I would like to go to meetings for the sake of other people,” he says in the group. “I remember being freshly sober and looking around a meeting and saying, ‘What’s the point of being sober? No one here seems happy, they seem fulfilled. They don’t have any character traits I want to work on.’ For me, I don’t feel like drinking. I am very comfortable there. But I can be there to help someone else.”
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