- May 23, 2025
Every marathon has a finish line.
Dr. Jessie Bech is a Palm Coast dentist, who has earned the rare Six Star Finisher Medal, awarded to runners who have finished all six Abbott World Marathon Majors — Boston, Chicago, New York, London, Berlin and Tokyo.
There are over 20,000 Six Star Finishers worldwide, but only about 7,000 are women. Bech earned her Six Star Finisher on March 2 when she completed the Tokyo Marathon in 3 hours, 41 minutes.
Now, Abbott appears to be moving the finish line, adding three more major world marathons. Sydney has already been approved. The Shanghai and Cape Town marathons are still in the evaluation process.
Bech may one day trade her Six Star Finisher Medal for a Nine Star Finisher Medal. It’s not like runners stop at the finish line, anyway. They recover and run again. Bech has run in 15 marathons and an Iron Man triathlon since 2011. She plans to run in her third Boston Marathon next year with friends.
A lot has changed since she was a track athlete at Cardinal Gibbons High School in Fort Lauderdale. She was a sprinter, hurdler and long jumper who equated the track team’s two-mile warm-up run to torture.
“It's funny,” she said. “The cross-country coach kept trying to get me to come out for cross country and I remember I looked at him and I said, ‘I'm a sprinter, I'm not a runner.’”
She became a runner after her youngest son, Jack, was born in 2009. She pushed her two sons, Chase and Jack, in a double jogging stroller. It was a way to get back in shape, she said.
She began meeting other local runners and they would run together, taking turns pushing the stroller.
“We’d go on a five-mile run and the boys would get pushed by this person for a mile and me for a mile, and they thought it was so much fun. It was great exercise,” she said.
Two years after she began jogging while pushing the stroller, she ran the Chicago Marathon. Her time was 3:55. At first, she said, “I’m never doing that again.” Then she decided she’d try to qualify for Boston, because that’s the hardest marathon to get into.
“Why not go for the ultimate pinnacle in running? Clearly I needed to do that,” she said. “That’s just my personality.”
In November, 2014, she and her husband, Shawn Magee, her sister, her friend and her friend’s husband all took advantage of a rule that would go away the following year — guaranteed entry into the New York City Marathon if you fail to get picked in the lottery three years in a row.
All five of them ran in New York.
Magee and Bech are both dentists and share a practice at Cypress Point Family Dentistry. During the NYC Marathon, she stayed with her husband during the race.
“He broke four hours. That was his big claim to fame,” Bech said.
Four hours is a barometer for marathon runners. Magee’s time was 3:58.30.
“He was like, ‘If I don’t get under four, I know I’m going to have to run another one,’” Bech said. “He ended up in the med tent afterwards, but he did it. He’s like, ‘Check, I can check it off the list.’”
Six weeks after New York, Bech ran the Jacksonville Marathon and qualified for Boston with a time of 3:39.
She ran Boston the first time in 2016 with a group of about 10 runners from Flagler County.
“It was a big group of us that went and we all had so much fun. It was a ridiculously hot day,” she said.
At that point she started thinking about trying to get into the other marathon majors. In 2018, she went through a tour operator to enter the London Marathon. She made it a family trip with Shawn, the boys and her parents.
“I mentally prepared for it to be cold and rainy. And it was the hottest London Marathon on record,” she said. “There was just people passing out. It was a crazy race, but it was so, so beautiful. I loved the course. You go over the Tower Bridge.”
In 2022, Bech and a friend got into the Berlin Marathon through the lottery. Her kids didn’t want to go on the trip. Chase Magee was a junior at Flagler Palm Coast High School and the kicker on the football team. He didn’t want to be taken out of school during his junior year, Bech said. While she was in Germany, Chase kicked the winning field goal against Ponte Vedra High, which helped the Bulldogs reach the playoffs that season.
“Thank goodness he didn't go,” she says now.
She knew Tokyo would be the last in her quest because it’s the farthest. Jack always wanted to go to Japan. Since he’s a sophomore in the IB program at FPC, this would probably be the best opportunity for him to make the trip, Bech said.
“It has to be his sophomore year,” she said. “I’m getting a little older, so I said this is the year,”
This time she gained entry through charity. She put in a bid to the Ronald McDonald House. She worte an essay as to why it's important to her and he got accepted.
Jack, who is fascinated by World War II history, wanted to visit Hiroshima. They visited the Peace Memorial.
“They’re big trips. They’re expensive,” she said. “Everywhere I’ve gone I wanted to travel around and see the area. There are a lot of people that just go for the race. I don’t get that. If we’re going to go, we’re going to see Japan.”
Finishing all six major marathons has been a journey, she said. In the next breath, she said, “I’m going to do three more, I guess.”
I love that my patients all you know that I do this and ask me about it,” Bech said. “I have an identity as a mom and a dentist, and I have this whole other passion that has brought me so much joy between the friendships and the volunteering. As much as I even love running my own race, going and supporting friends and volunteering (at her friend Carrie Meng’s children’s trail runs), it's just a fantastic experience. It's brought a lot of joy to my life, for sure.”
