For much of his life, 38-year-old Ben Johnson never stepped foot in a gym. He didn’t think twice about chugging cans of Mountain Dew everyday between Burger King drive-thrus. But in 2016, Johnson was feeling heavy and out of shape. So he decided to take control of his health. First, he focused on cutting processed foods and counted calories to lose 60 pounds from his 195-pound frame over the course of a year. Then, Johnson signed up for his first race, which jump-started his fitness journey. One mile kept leading to another, and the mechanical engineer and father of two from Minneapolis transformed into a hardcore marathoner who now travels the world to race. In 2023, Johnson went to his edge by challenging himself to complete 12 marathons in a year. Here, he reveals the strategies that made it happen for him:
I HAD NO baseline fitness when I stared running in 2018. In fact, I hadn’t done any sports or exercise in 15 years. But when I signed up for a local 10-mile race under the influence of colleagues, the challenge forced me to learn how to train. I had only a couple of months to prepare. My goal was simply to complete the distance.
I realized the training would be a time commitment, so I got into a habit of waking up two hours earlier, at 5 a.m., a few days a week. That allowed me to carve time to run before work, but it also meant being disciplined to go to bed earlier.
Since I didn’t have any previous running experience, I made up all of my training. I would go outside three days a week and run whatever distance I wanted as fast as I could. Every week, as long as my body felt OK, I ran a mile further.
When I started running, I also signed up for a strength challenge at my work gym. I had to log my workouts as part of the requirements, but this helped with establishing a training routine in preparation for the race.
That first race was a positive experience. I ran it hard, and afterward I was curious about what else I was capable of achieving. I dove into learning how I could improve. I read training books—Daniels’ Running Formula, Advanced Marathoning, and Hansons Marathon Method—because I knew that someday I wanted to run a marathon. That was the pinnacle of racing to me.
THE BEST MARATHON GEAR, FOR BEGINNERS & EXPERTS, TESTED BY US
In 2019, I ran six days a week and worked up to logging 50 miles a week. My goal that year was to do my first marathon and to try under three hours. I raced local 5Ks, 10Ks, and half marathons in the build up toward my goal that summer.
I ran my first marathon successfully in 2 hours and 52 minutes. I continued to sign up for races because I wanted to keep challenging myself. By the end of 2022, within four years of becoming a runner, I had finished 15 marathons, including Boston and Chicago.
But in 2023, I decided to try something extreme. I’d signed up for six marathons in the first half of the year; then I decided to keep going for the second half of the year. I thought 12 marathons total seemed like a good number.
I started by running two marathons three weeks apart in January and February—Houston and Donna in Jacksonville. My goal after was to finish the Boston and London marathons, which were six days apart. Portland was a week later, and then the Eugene Marathon the following week.
Then, I prepared for six more races: Grandma’s and Xenia Avenue, both in Minnesota, Berlin, Chicago, New York City, and I finished the challenge with the California International Marathon in December.
A few important things I learned that helped me get there:
Recovery Rules
THE BOSTON COURSE is really hard and trashes your legs. I was really sore afterward, but I got on an international flight to the U.K. wearing compression socks to help with recovery.
When I landed in London, one of the first things I did was buy a foam roller. Foam rolling is something I do everyday—in the morning before I run, after a run, and when I come home from work, just five minutes each time. It makes my muscles feel more loose and helps my recovery.
The other big thing is that I quit drinking. I haven’t had alcohol in 18 months. It was something I slowly worked into cutting out during the Covid pandemic, and the lack of social events helped. I reframed my mindset from “I don’t drink” to deciding that drinking didn’t benefit my running. It became clear that if I drank and ran the next day, my legs felt bad—everything just felt bad.
Having Fun Releases Pressure
ONE THING THAT made the challenge manageable was not going full effort. In fact, some of my finishes were close to 10 minutes off of my personal record of 2:36:38. I try to understand where my fitness is and how my workouts have been going, and that sets how fast I’m going to race.
I feel like a lot of people have an arbitrary goal time months ahead of a race and will barrel toward it even if their fitness isn’t there and then they blow up in the race. While I finished every marathon in less than three hours, one of the keys I learned during my first two years of racing is to not put pressure on yourself. I worked on decoupling my mind from having to run a personal record at every race and instead reframed my thought to: make sure to enjoy the experience.
Consistency Is King
I’VE AVERAGED RUNNING nine-and-a-half miles every day since 2020, which equates to 3,300 miles a year. My mileage and consistency over the years is what helped me accomplish running 12 marathons in 12 months—the reality is that agenda is not conducive to having a solid training block. I had a couple weeks of decent training before I’d taper (reduce the mileage) before a race, and then I’d run easy miles the week after a marathon. I repeated that every month. That was in combination with lifting three days a week in my basement—mostly barbell, back squats, bench press and deadlifts.
Faster Isn’t Always Better
THE EXPERIENCE OF running 12 marathons in 12 months helped me understand that one workout or one race is not going to make or break you. It helped shift my mindset that I didn’t have to run a personal best or put all of the mental pressure to perform well onto any given race. Running a “slower” time didn’t feel like a failure because I learned how to truly appreciate the running experience as a whole. At the end of the day, it’s about being consistent in the process, not simply just the end result.
