Built for the Long Run.

In the spring of 2012, Albie Masland ran across the United States. All 3,025 miles of it, on foot, from the Pacific at Dana Point, California to the Atlantic, roughly a marathon a day for five months straight.

He was not a professional athlete. He was a guy whose life had quietly come apart. Law school in San Diego had not worked out. His grandfather had died. The job market had nothing for him. So he started running. One mile, then two, then three times a day, just to outrun the stress.

In early 2010, nothing seemed to be working. So I started running.

Then one afternoon he turned to a friend and said the thing out loud: I'm going to run across the country. But he knew almost immediately it could not just be about him. He kept seeing servicemembers on the news coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving a brotherhood behind, trying to rebuild ordinary lives. "What are my problems," he thought, "compared to that?"

That question pointed him to the Travis Manion Foundation, named for a young Marine lieutenant killed in Iraq in 2007. Before his final deployment, Travis had told his family, "If not me, then who?" Those words became the foundation's rallying cry, and they became Albie's too, right alongside its motto: honor the fallen by challenging the living.

When Albie brought his plan to the foundation, the person across the table was its first executive director, James Brobyn, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and combat-injured Marine Corps veteran. Most people hear "I want to run three thousand miles across America" and reach for a polite no. James backed it. The foundation got behind the run, Albie named it Operation Amerithon, and on St. Patrick's Day, he stepped off.

The road was strange and humbling. Eight pairs of shoes. Subway sandwiches seventy times over. A motel in the Arizona desert, then six inches of snow the next morning. Strangers pulled over to hand him whatever cash was in their pockets. A man rolled down his window, showed a Marine tattoo, and simply said thank you. And on the hard days, soaked and sore and wondering why on earth he was doing this, Albie would remember the people he was running for, out in 125-degree heat under sixty pounds of gear, and the self-pity would burn off.

There's no going back. I pushed through pain, because there was no going back.

By the time he reached the Atlantic, he had raised more than $40,000 for the foundation. And when he came off the road, James hired him. It was the start of a decade at the Travis Manion Foundation, where Albie rose through leadership and stood in front of more than 1,500 young people as a Character Does Matter ambassador, teaching the same lesson the road had taught him: that purpose is something you build, mile by mile, by showing up for other people. He kept giving back for years, nearly $100,000 in all, across a string of endurance efforts that included a Houston-to-San Diego relay and the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim-to-rim in a single day.

James left in 2014 to start building businesses of his own. The two stayed in each other's orbit, and the bet James had placed on a bearded stranger with an impossible plan turned out to be a long one.

From service to the can

What does any of this have to do with a hemp-infused seltzer?

Everything, as it turns out. By 2022, James had built American Fiber Co., a veteran-owned, vertically integrated cannabis company in Delaware, and the paths of the two men crossed again. A decade after Albie first pitched him on an impossible run, they sat down as partners. They still spoke the same language. James had spent those years building a serious platform of brands rooted in quality and craft. Albie had spent them learning how to carry a mission and bring a whole community along with him. The fit was obvious, and this time it ran both ways.

Albie came on to lead the company's wellness arm, and in 2024 he refounded it as Levitate, with James as his partner and the foundation beneath it, and Mike Burian, the company's COO, helping turn the vision into a real operation. (The business runs under Ambassador Distributing LLC, doing business as Levitate.) What started as a single idea has grown into a brand now sold across more than forty states, with its core retail home in liquor stores throughout Delaware, Illinois, and North Carolina.

Hybrid plant performance

Albie did not want to put weed in a can. Plenty of people had already done that, and most of it, in his blunt assessment, tastes terrible. "Our drink tastes good," he says. "Some are shockingly horrible."

So Levitate was built around a simple, stubborn idea he calls Hybrid Plant Performance: pair hemp-derived THC with functional botanicals that actually do something. Every twelve-ounce can blends ten milligrams of Delta-9 THC with CBG, cordyceps mushroom, and L-theanine, tuned for a clean, social lift without the wreckage. The flavors carry the same wink: Bingo Bango Blood Orange Mango, Salted Watermelon, and Grape Lime Ginger, a nod to the classic Transfusion with the alcohol left out.

That last part is the whole point. Levitate is made for people who want to enjoy the moment and still own the morning. The tailgate and the trailhead. The end of a workout and the start of a weekend. Fun without the fallout.

For the doers

If there is one thread that runs from a beard-grown stranger jogging through the Mojave to a sleek can on a Delaware shelf, it is this: Albie Masland builds things for doers. Parents and professionals, weekend warriors and first responders, the people who keep showing up. He still lives by the line he borrowed on a desert highway more than a decade ago, and he still applies it to everything he makes.

And the giving never stopped. It just changed shape. Today the same mission that started on a desert highway runs through the company itself, with Levitate, Field Supply, and Valor Craft all putting real dollars behind veteran and first-responder health through the Buds from Above Brain Health for Heroes Campaign.

If not me, then who?

That is the spirit in every can of Levitate. Welcome to the long run.