Ben Zajac scored nearly 2,000 points on the basketball court at Slippery Rock High.

He has ridden a bike from Canada to Mexico with his older brother, Adam.

But nothing prepared him for his latest undertaking: training to run in the Pittsburgh Marathon May 6.

“No, I did not run at all (in high school),” said Zajac, a 2001 Slippery Rock graduate. “I’m not a runner at all.”

But he is one now because of family.

The Zajac clan — Adam, Ben, Kiersten and Noah — decided in December to all run in the Pittsburgh Marathon.

Kiersten was the catalyst, but at first none of her brothers wanted to do it.

“Noah was the key,” Kiersten said. “Once he said yes, well, no one else could say no.

“We all try to show each other up, and it’s a lot of motivation,” added Kiersten, a 2005 Slippery Rock grad. “I always have tried to keep up with my brothers.”

Once everyone had committed, the Zajacs began the search for a training regime. That was made more difficult by the fact that the clan was scattered across the country.

Adam, a 1998 Slippery Rock grad, lives in San Diego; Kiersten resides in Pittsburgh; Ben and Noah live 25 minutes apart in the Baltimore metro area.

None of them have trained together in the three-plus months since they decided to run, yet they keep in touch via phone calls, social media and text messages.

Even long-distance training has brought out the clan’s competitiveness.

“If Noah finishes in five hours and a minute, I want to finish in five hours,” Ben said. “As long as I beat Noah, I don’t care.”

Noah struggled at first with his training.

While it has since gotten easier, the early stages were brutal, he said.

“It’s sad to say, but the farthest I’ve ever run at one time in my life was three miles,” Noah said. “The very first day of training you have to run three miles. That first week was dreadful. I thought about faking an injury, but I couldn’t live with my brothers and Kiersten if I did that.”

Ben and Noah did have a taste of things to come when they ran in the Krispy Kreme Challenge Feb. 4 in Raleigh, N.C.

The duo had to run 2.5 miles, eat a dozen glazed donuts, and then run another 2.5 miles in less than an hour.

Ben finished in 45 minutes. Noah came in about 20 minutes later.

“I eat a little bit faster than he does,” Ben said.

Adam is the only one of the Zajacs who has completed a marathon. Adam, who is a lieutenant in the Civil Engineer Corps of the Navy, ran in the 2002 Marine Corp Marathon with only three weeks of training.

That’s one of the reasons why he was hesitant to do it again.

“After the first one, I said I’m never going to do that again,” Adam said. “But this one should be better. Man, I hope so.”

The Zajacs are up to 20-mile training runs. Ben, though, suffered an ankle injury that has put him behind schedule.

Ben and Adam started their training in pretty good shape because of a summer bike riding excursion they took from Vancouver, British Columbia, to the Mexican border near San Diego.

It took the brothers 20 days to complete the journey.

“We averaged 96 miles per day,” Ben said. “It was a blast. When we got to the border, we took a trolley the five miles back to Adam’s house. We didn’t want to ride our bikes anymore.”

Ben is an eighth-grade math teacher at Deep Creek Elementary School in Baltimore County.

Noah. a 2006 Slippery Rock grad, is a regional safety manager for an armored car company in the Washington D.C. metro area.

Kiersten is in graduate school at Chatham University studying occupational therapy.

All the Zajacs will unite in May for the marathon.

“It’s going to be so much fun,” said Kiersten, who ran track and field and cross country at Slippery Rock as well as California (Pa.) University. “It’s going to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I’ll get to do it with my brothers.

“We will all find a way to finish,” she added. “Even if we have to crawl over the finish line.”