via Paul Johnson
Right now, Navy veteran Paul Johnson is attempting to run 700 miles on a treadmill in 7 days, all in Chubbies shorts, to raise $700k for the Bronx Burners. Most of us consider it a win if we manage to drag our butts off the couch and onto the treadmill for a solid 30 minutes without having a minor existential crisis. Maybe we’re training for a 5k we signed up for after three beers, or maybe we just want to offset the weekend’s pizza intake.
Then there’s Paul Johnson. This dude, a Navy veteran turned ultrarunning madman, looked at a treadmill and though, “Yeah, I could probably live on that for a week.”
And that’s exactly what he’s doing. Johnson is currently in the middle of an attempt to absolutely shatter a world record by running 700 miles on a treadmill. In seven days, no typo. That’s 100 miles a day, on a glorified hamster wheel, fueled by French fries and the raw admission that, “My life sucks right now. I hate this,” he says in a YouTube video documenting his first day of the challenge. “But if I don’t finish…there’s gonna be a lot of people that are pretty let down.”
Bro move, through and through.
“The worst thing that can happen is you fail,” Johnson says on camera. “And then you just keep trying. You just try again.” It’s a simple ethos, but it’s the engine behind this whole crazy endeavor. He’s only 5% confident he can actually hit the 700-mile mark, but he’s 100% confident in the reason he’s trying.
And he’s doing it all in Chubbies shorts too, who’s documenting this incredible feat in real-time…
The Mission: A Run Club That’s Raising Money For Kids in The Bronx
This awesome treadmill stunt with Chubbie aims to raise an eye-watering $700,000 for the Bronx Burners, a non-profit dedicated to supporting youth in one of NYC’s most underserved communities.
Why the Bronx Burners? The answer was simple for Johnson: “the youth aspect.” He saw a group that was different from other run clubs. “There’s very few run clubs,” he explains, “that pour every single dollar they have into furthering the education, furthering the athletic opportunities for youth.”
TAP HERE TO WATCH THE STREAM + DONATE TO THE BRONX BURNERS!
To call the Bronx Burners a run club would be selling it short; it’s a lifeline. Co-founder Rob Dalto says they “got hit in the face with our mission” when they saw the reality their community’s youth were facing. “We had a bunch of kids who had aspiration to go to college and right before they were meant to go, couldn’t. Finances became an issue, lack of guidance, of support. And so we thought to make it a non-profit organization, grant scholarships, and help bridge that gap to college.”
The $700k Paul is running for is a “transformative” launchpad for that mission. It’s earmarked for academic scholarships, mentorship programs to reach kids sooner, and even building a community center to create a safe and inclusive space for everyone.
From the High Seas to the Hamster Wheel
So, why would any sane human being subject themselves to this level of voluntary misery?
For Johnson, it started as a way to outrun his own demons. After seven years in the Navy, he was grappling with the all-too-common trifecta of anxiety, depression, and PTSD. As he put it, the military’s go-to coping mechanism wasn’t exactly cutting it. “Drinking is the main coping mechanism of the Navy,” Johnson admits. “Like ‘drink like a sailor’ is no joke.”
He learned the hard way that it’s “really hard to go out on a Saturday morning in the heat of San Diego and run 20 miles if you’ve been out drinking a bunch the night before.” So, the drinking had to stop. He swapped the bar for the pavement. A marathon turned into a 100-miler. A casual run became a full-blown transcontinental trek. A casual run became a full-blown transcontinental trek—a 3,000-mile journey so epic it was chronicled in his Apple TV documentary, The Transcon.
Running became his therapy. “Running definitely saved my life,” he says, with zero hesitation. Running became his therapy. “Running definitely saved my life,” he says, with zero hesitation.
Running From a Darker Finish Line
The summary version is one thing, but in March 2025, Johnson dropped an Instagram story that laid his soul bare, and it hits like a freight train. The darkness he was navigating was heavy, and he lays it all out in the caption:
I have been thinking about how to share everything for a very long time. Creating this post made me feel physically ill and nauseous. It’s hard and no one wants to talk about it. Myself included. The Transcon documentary will be releasing, and I am also leaving the Navy very soon. There’s going to be a lot of questions so hopefully this answers some of them. I do not want your pity. I just want to provide you with some insight on life and what you do not always see. I am far from being the only one. The last 7 years have been rough. The last 2 years have been even rougher. Now with about 2 months to go, I feel I can finally see some light. Doesn’t mean things are over though.
Via a series of pictures + text, he starts in 2018, stationed in Spain where “Poor leadership, optempo, isolation was tough for me and my peers.”
His coping mechanism became alcohol, and it got ugly. “It was not uncommon to wake-up on a park bench in the morning after blacking out,” he shared. It was a spiral. He confessed to “Driving to work every morning I wished a car would crash into me,” and while on the ship, “staring into the dark water thinking how easy it would be to step over the side and not have to worry about anything anymore.”
A move to San Diego in 2021 didn’t help. He felt he “had no purpose and still hoped someone would crash into me on the way to work every morning.” The drinking escalated. “Apparently, 13 drinks in a 2-hour period was not a normal thing people do,” he wrote with grim self-awareness. The thoughts got darker. “I spent a lot of time on the roof of my building staring at the ground wondering if I would feel anything as I hit it from 31 stories up.”
Then, in 2022, a lifeline: “I started running with a friend to train for a marathon.” The drinking slowed, “but more symptoms surfaced without the alcohol and the only solution was to keep running.” It wasn’t a magic cure. A move to Newport in 2023 left him isolated, and his “mental health continued to decline.” Things got critically bad. “I would lay in bed crying, unable to breathe or think and I started cutting myself to feel better and relieve pressure.”
After trying medications, he landed on the one thing that truly helped. The one thing that gave him a path forward.
In March 2024, he started the Transcon. Why? Because it was “Doing the only thing I knew how to help with how I am feeling. Running.”
The story doesn’t end there. The run itself was a brutal mirror of his deployment, and when he finally finished the 3,000 miles in NYC, he “felt nothing… It was just another day.” The battle continued. By July, he was in a partial hospitalization program, feeling that “any sense of support I had from peers was completely gone and they despised me.” But even in that darkness, he found what worked. It wasn’t therapy, but community. “The moments I felt best were with the people who made the Transcon a success.”
He’s brutally honest about the fact that he’s “still fighting,” but there’s a light on the horizon. His medical separation from the Navy is almost complete. “I have been hanging on by a thread the past 9 months,” he admits, but in two months, he’ll be leaving the service. It’s a future that’s “both exciting and terrifying.” He concludes with a dose of hard-won hope that sums it all up: “It has been a long fight, but things do eventually get better.”
The Internet’s Verdict: A Certified Madman
After Chubbies posted the update on Day One on their socials, the internet did what it rarely does: it united in overwhelming, positive support.
The comment section became a tidal wave of awe and encouragement. You had everything from the relatable, “I get a blister just walking around Disney World,” to the emphatic, “HOLY FORKING SHIRT BALLS!! Be safe.” Fellow veterans chimed in with a heartfelt, “Shipmate, let’s goooooo! Proud of you and happy to see you back after it!”
It was a pretty epic moment of digital sunshine, a collective understanding that they were witnessing something truly, absurdly special.
Putting 700 Miles in Perspective
To understand how utterly insane Johnson’s run is, you just have to look at the current zeitgeist of extreme running. We are living in the golden age of absurd yet awesome athletic suffering, and the bar for ‘crazy’ keeps getting higher. My business partner, Cass, our editor-in-chief here at this site, does a tremendous job documenting it. Just in the past year, we’ve seen:
- The Dead Cow Gully ‘Last Man Standing’: Where an Aussie ran 495 miles in 5 days.
- The ‘Last Man Standing’ Ultramarathon in Texas: Where runners complete a 4.2-mile loop every hour, on the hour, until only one person remains. This year, two guys were declared co-winners after a thunderstorm stopped the race… after they had both run 235.2 miles.
- The Moab Triple Crown: A 640-mile record was set by some madman.
- The 50K Taco Bell Ultramarathon: A 31-mile race through Denver where runners must eat a required item at 9 of 10 Taco Bell locations. If you throw up, you’re disqualified.
- Dean Karnazes:T he OG who ran 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 days. Practically a superhuman.
- The NYC “10-10-10 Challenge”: An urban triathlon of running 10 miles through Manhattan while stopping to crush a slice of pizza and a beer every single mile.
- The ‘Culver’s Marathon’: A Wisconsin man ran 26.2 miles from one Culver’s to another, fueling himself with cheese curds and concrete mixers along the way.
- The Pacific Crest Trail 24x24x24 Challenge: A hiker attempted to eat 24 McDonald’s burgers, drink 24 beers, and hike 24 miles on the PCT in 24 hours. He crushed the beers and miles but tapped out at 15 burgers.
- The ‘7 Marathons, 7 Continents, 7 Days’ Challenge: A casual, week-long jog that has athletes setting records in Antarctica on a Tuesday and then jetting off to Africa for another 26.2 miles on Wednesday, all for the low price of $52,000.
These people are a different breed. Hell, a viral video recently showed a bunch of regular guys trying to hold a world-record marathon pace on a treadmill; most were launched off the back in seconds.
I think all this puts into perspective Paul Johnson’s mission, choosing to do his suffering not on a majestic mountain, but in a climate-controlled room in New York City, staring at a wall for 700 miles while being filmed and livestreamed.
TAP HERE TO WATCH THE STREAM + DONATE TO THE BRONX BURNERS!
These people are a different breed.
And now, here’s Paul Johnson, choosing to do his suffering in a climate-controlled room in New York City with a live stream pointed at his face 24/7. He’s not traversing majestic mountains; he’s staring at a wall.
So while most of us are doomscrolling on the toilet, this guy is putting one foot in front of the other, over and over again, for a bunch of kids he’d never met. He’s turning a dark place into a beacon of hope, one monotonous, miserable, and magnificent mile at a time. And that’s something worth cheering for. We’re all rooting him on.
If you want to help Paul on his quest and support the Bronx Burners, you can donate here. Go on, do it. It’s way easier than running 700 miles.