On a freezing february morning in Boston, Meaghan O’Sullivan arrived at the Chestnut Hill Reservoir. She searched the faces filling the park, looking for a pack of runners and specifically for a man known as Coach Mike. She had sent him an email. She wanted to join the Boston Bulldogs, a running club for people in recovery or affected by addiction.
“When Coach called, I was prepared to tell him why I was qualified to be a Bulldog,” O’Sullivan says. “But he just said to show up.”
She spotted a group of about 20. They stretched together while an older, thin-framed man with pale blue eyes talked in a gravelly voice, reminding them to use the run to find the kindhearted warrior inside themselves.
O’Sullivan was just months out of rehab, bumping around the edges of a new, sober life and searching for identity. She liked running and she liked the way Coach Mike had extended an invitation free of judgment. When she joined the circle, no one singled her out, they just made room. And then, they went for a run.
Coach Mike is Mike Ferullo, 70, a clinical social worker from Boston who runs the Bulldogs with his wife, Shelley. He wasn’t always a runner, and in his distant past, never thought anyone would call him “coach.”
Ferullo grew up in a hard neighborhood in Boston. He’s the type of person who dives headlong into things, who can cultivate passion easily. But when he was young, he was aimless. It was, he thinks now, the product of growing up where he did and the makeup of his personality that led him to drop out of school in the eighth grade, start using drugs by the age of 15, and be hooked on heroin at just 17.
For five years, enslaved by opiates, he bounced in and out of detox, sometimes landing in jail. By 22, he knew that if he didn’t kick his addiction, he’d die. After six months of rehab and three months in a halfway house, he started rebuilding his life. The hardest part of his recovery was finding a way to define himself as something other than an addict.
It was 1974 in Boston, and Ferullo saw other guys circling the Charles River in short-shorts. He thought, why not? Running might give him a way to expel extra energy. He discovered soon that its highs—endorphins, achievements, community—gave him new life and purpose.
Two years after he got sober, he ran the New York City Marathon. The distance gave him confidence outside of running. He went back to school, graduated college, and eventually earned a master’s degree in social work at Boston College. But he wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to help others pull themselves out from the hell of addiction. “I had this vision of people using running to get sober,” he says.
In 2008, he started volunteering at a male post-detox unit. “Every Saturday, I’d have a running program for whoever wanted to join. I had each guy establish a goal,” he says. Many of the patients still smoked. But Ferullo encouraged them, no matter how unfit they were. “Once they could run up to 45 minutes, they’d be hooked both on the self-esteem for meeting the goal and on the feeling that happens while running.”
But Ferullo saw a frustrating trend. Once the guys left for halfway houses, it was hard for them to maintain a running regimen on their own. In 2015, he started the Boston Bulldogs. “It doesn’t matter if you’ve never run before,” he says. “I tell every person, just show up.”
When O’Sullivan arrived that February morning three years ago, she and Ferullo decided that a 10K was a good first goal. She got a wellness sponsor—essentially a running buddy—to help her stick to training and keep her coming to the group runs. “We want everyone to have a human connection, a friend to help them,” Ferullo says.
Ferullo also wanted a reward-based structure to keep members reaching toward goals. So he implemented The Full Circle. Once members achieve their first goal—making it through one circle—they go on by picking another distance or time. There are four levels until a person reaches Full Circle Leadership, a designation that also affords a monthly stipend.
Last April, O’Sullivan completed her fourth circle by running the Boston Marathon as a charity runner for the Bulldogs. The following year she ran the Mohawk Hudson Marathon with a goal of a Boston Qualifying time. “I was over by 15 minutes,” she says. “But it’s really about challenging myself in a way that was never possible before.”
Now with 175 active members and four chapters in New England, Ferullo hopes more will join him in creating a Bulldogs movement.