On the plaque: She was one of two women to first represent Penn at the NCAA Championships, qualifying in the outdoor 5,000 in 1982, and also was a two-time Heptagonal Games champion that year, sweeping the indoor and outdoor 5,000. She graduated with seven individual records and was a part of three relay records. She was a four-year letter winner in cross country, a three-year letter winner in track & field, and a member of Penn's indoor and outdoor Heps championship teams in 1984.
 
Back in her competitive running days at Penn, Riva (Gensib) Johnson C'84 was best known for her ability in the distance races, the 5,000 and the 10,000. The 5,000, her specialty, took her about 17 minutes to run the 12.5 times around the outdoor track, or 25 trips around the indoor ring.
 
These days, that's nothing more to her than a quick jog around the block.
 
Johnson has taken her passion for running and put it toward becoming an ultra-marathoner, tackling races quite a bit longer than the traditional 26.2 miles—sometimes running up to 100 miles straight, in races all over the country and occasionally around the world.
 
"I had run a marathon in high school and I knew at some point I would run another marathon," the Cherry Hill, N.J. native said. "But the whole ultra thing has evolved."
 
That evolution began in South Jersey, where Johnson started her high school years at Cherry Hill West playing field hockey and lacrosse. Running was something she did in the wintertime only to stay in shape.
 
But she was tired of playing midfield in both sports: "I did a lot of running up and down the sidelines and not a lot of hands-on with the ball," she said, "and it kind of got a little boring for me."
 
When her field hockey coaches told her that a move up to the goal-scoring positions would mean starting at the bottom of the depth chart, Johnson decided that if she was going to just be running, she might as well do it competitively.
 
"I figured this way, I kind of controlled my own destiny," she said. "In track and cross-country, generally you get out of it what you put into it, so I decided I would see what I could do.
 
"We had a pretty small team; as a matter of fact, the girls' team never had enough runners to score as a team, you just did as well as you did. I had pretty good success right away, which made it an easier switch."
 
As Johnson was getting ready to start looking at colleges, the Penn women's cross-country/track & field program was just getting off the ground. Head coach Betty Costanza and assistant Julio Piazza turned a club program that in 1976 had only six women participating and moved it up to varsity status in 1978; as it turned out, the class that entered Penn in the fall of 1980 was their first with recruited student-athletes.
 
Almost the entire team competed in cross-country in the fall, indoor track in the winter, and outdoor track in the spring.
 
Johnson's distance-running talent was apparent to her college teammates "immediately," according to her classmate and fellow Penn Athletics Hall of Famer Dr. Mary (Turner) DePalma C'84. DePalma remembered how, when Coach Piazza would set distance-running standards for the team to hit in practice, Johnson paced the pack to perfection.
 
"Julio would tell us 'I want you to go run three miles, and I want each mile to be a six-minute mile pace, go run three of them back-to-back,'" DePalma said. "We would be plus or minus three seconds of that number each time—and we didn't have the Garmin watches and heart-rate monitors that everybody's running with now."
 
Johnson's first major individual collegiate achievement came in 1982, when as a sophomore she won the 5,000 meters at both the indoor and outdoor Ivy Heptagonal Championships, more commonly known as Heps. She also qualified for the NCAA Outdoor championships in the 5,000 while DePalma qualified in the 800.
 
That was a massive accomplishment for a program that had only begun to exist six years earlier.
 
"That first year, we were last all the time," DePalma said. "And within an extraordinarily short period of time, a small group of people working collectively and willing to work hard and press one another, we were able to do really good things. When I look back on what we accomplished in just fundamentally a year, year-and-a-half, it was a pretty remarkable transformation in terms of growing a program."
 
By the time she graduated, Johnson had helped lead the Quakers to both indoor and outdoor Heps championships in 1984 and held seven different track records. For all those accomplishments, she has certainly earned her spot in the Penn Athletics Hall of Fame's Class XI.
 
"Obviously you hope it's something your accomplishments are worthy of," she said, "but there's a lot of really good athletes who have come through Penn in the last 30-plus years, so it certainly wasn't something I was expecting. But I was very pleasantly surprised."
 
Since Penn, Johnson has lived all over the United States due to her husband Michael Johnson's military career. They met in Anchorage in 1985 when she was spending the summer up there visiting friends, and Johnson's adventurous side had her moving up there by the end of that summer.
 
The Johnsons went from Alaska to Virginia and up to North Carolina in the first six years of their marriage. Then came a time out in Monterey (Cali.) at the Naval postgraduate school, followed by stops in West Point (N.Y.) and Orlando for a few years each, then back up to West Point for six years before Michael retired from the Army and they moved to Carlisle, Pa., where he worked at Dickinson College. The last few years, they've been living in Bend, Oregon.
 
Along the way, they had three children: daughters Denali (30) and Rachel (28), and a son, Ellis (23).
 
And she's never stopped running.
 
"I just really love to run," Johnson said. "The one thing I try to tell kids is that running is something you can do basically your whole life.
 
"The whole reason we went to New Zealand [in February 2019]—not the whole reason, I've always wanted to go to New Zealand—but it was this race that I saw a video of and I said to my husband, 'I'm going to New Zealand because I want to do this race.' It was the most beautiful place I've ever run, and it's just stunning. I've gotten to go to Israel to run, we went to England with part of the team. That's just places and things I might never have gone and seen if it hadn't been for running."
 
The sightseeing might be nice, but the events are no joke. They're grueling races, the longest of which have taken her over a day to complete.
 
There are pit stops along the way where racers stop to refuel and get encouragement from family members; Michael, an avid biker, often accompanies her on her races, carrying her snacks and other tools of the ultra-marathon trade.
 
"The worst thing is for me, I can never sleep that night," Johnson said. "You'd think you would be so tired you'd pass out the minute you lay flat, but I'm usually kind of sore or the adrenaline is still going. I toss and turn and end up not sleeping well, which is kind of the total opposite of what you would think."
 
Down in New Zealand, Riva and Rachel Johnson ran the 85-kilometer Old Ghost Ultra, a trail race of nearly 53 miles that includes more than a mile's worth of vertical ascent. Riva finished 45th in a field of nearly 300, her time just over nine-and-a-half hours; Rachel finished 110th, less than a minute past 11 hours.
 
"It was not an easy race, and I was very, very proud of (Rachel) that she finished the way she did," Johnson said. "She wasn't too happy by the end of it, but by that night and the next day, she's like 'that wasn't so bad.'"
 
But, Johnson said, that's typical. As exhausting as ultra-marathons can be, there's a redemptive quality in finishing them, a sense of accomplishment, of conquering a mountain few people are willing—much less able—to climb.
 
"You get through it and you finish," she said, "and about two days later you forgot about what it was like, and you start thinking about your next one."