Peachtree launched former AJC sports writer on a most outrageous quest

On July 4, 2003, Mike Knobler was not someone with ambition for the incomparable feat of running and travel that he now pursues — completing 26 marathons in 26 countries in 26 weeks.

He held no aspirations to run a marathon in all 50 states — an exclusive and strong-legged club he joined in June. He wasn’t even thinking about finishing a single marathon.

On that Independence Day 23 years ago, Knobler was a self-described nonathlete and fat slob who had just finished his first Peachtree Road Race. The accomplishment made him “so incredibly happy,” he said, even if his time was unspectacular for a 39-year-old male.

“It is hard for you to understand or appreciate, because you’ve never been a fat nonathlete, how marvelous I felt, how big a sense of accomplishment I felt,” Knobler told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “And I felt like, even though I’d finished in an hour and 12 minutes, that I’d won my personal Peachtree.”

Perhaps this resonates with you. One of the many wonderful aspects of the Northside Hospital Peachtree Road Race, an Atlanta institution unlike any other, is how it is open to all, whether you’re a whippet-thin mileage-pounder or the pudgy nonathlete that Knobler was in 2003. (Full disclosure: Mike, a former AJC sports writer, is a friend of mine.)

And another inspiring element of the world’s largest 10-kilometer road race is the power it can unleash within its finishers. Few personify that better than Knobler.

He took his literal first steps on his journey to attempt 26 marathons in 26 countries in 26 weeks on his 6.2-mile run from Lenox Square to Piedmont Park in 2003.

“Peachtree definitely was the impetus for me to go out and run, because I had no desire to run,” he said. “This was not, like, on a list of things I wanted to do.”

A little background on Knobler: In 2003, he was in his second year as a deputy sports editor at the AJC. He later continued there as a writer until 2009, at which point he left journalism for law school, first at Georgetown and then at Yale. He became a successful international tax attorney based in the San Francisco area and retired at the end of 2025, at the age of 62.

His running career had the most humble beginning. He decided to run the Peachtree because he felt it was something of a civic obligation for an Atlanta resident. Having never trained for a road race, he got advice from then-AJC sports editor Don Boykin, a Peachtree regular and an accomplished runner.

Boykin (another friend of mine, not to mention the person who hired me) suggested running one mile a day for a week and then increasing the distance to a mile and a half and so on. Knobler doesn’t remember how high the recommended mileage went, but figures it was probably around four miles.

“He said, ‘Don’t worry about how slow you go to at the start,’” Knobler said. “’Run if you can as long as you can.’”

The exhilaration of the first Peachtree led to his first half-marathon, which led to his first marathon. When he didn’t make his goal to break four hours — a respectable time, though fairly average in the world of marathoning — he tried again and fell short. Knobler told himself he would try once more and if he didn’t make it, that would be the last marathon. It was the Atlanta Marathon on Thanksgiving Day in 2004.

“And I ran a 3:56,” he said. “So I broke four hours — so I’ve been running marathons ever since.”

As Knobler’s marathons stacked up, he realized he could run a marathon in all 50 states, a noted pursuit in distance-running circles. Typically running about three marathons a year, he notched his 50th state at the Bear Lake Marathon in Idaho on June 5.

That race launched this 26/26/26 challenge, which he is three marathons into. The Guinness Book of World Records has no category for such a feat, according to a spokesperson. (An Englishman did run a staggering 196 marathons in 196 countries in 2018-19, but most of his 26-mile runs were not actual races.)

Most of Knobler’s scheduled races are in Europe, including the Athens Marathon, which traces the course of the original marathon in 490 BC. (You can follow his adventures at marathonflight.com.)

It is actually part of another goal for Knobler, a licensed pilot. He is attempting to circle the globe in his Mooney M20J, a single-engine propeller plane. A website that tracks such feats has record of only 257 circumnavigations in a single-engine aircraft.

As impossible as his accomplishments and goal may seem — for one thing, not all of us have that sort of time and means — they once did to Knobler, too.

“I was a couch potato,” he said. “I wasn’t active, really, in any way. I like to walk and stuff. You know how some people go to the gym? That wasn’t me.”

Knobler has two pieces of related advice. The key to being a runner, he said, is to get out the door on days that you don’t feel like running.

And he found that signing up for races helped on those days, he said, “because the dread of showing up for a race and not having trained for it — that does miracles.”

Saturday, of the expected 56,000 participants, 44% are Peachtree first-timers, a group that undoubtedly includes thousands entering any kind of race for the first time.