Inside San Quentin’s marathon club: ‘For that day they are runners, not criminals’

Running a marathon usually means going from point A to point B, witnessing some of the best sites a city has to offer. Not at San Quentin, the oldest, most notorious prison in California and home to the biggest death row in America. Here incarcerated men run 105 laps around a crowded yard, navigating a slope, 90-degree turns and monotony on a makeshift track. They are not chasing medals but the chance to be defined by more than their crimes.

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“It’s a goal and, for many of these men, they never had goals in their life, they didn’t have anything to look forward to,” says Christine Yoo, director of 26.2 to Life, an ESPN documentary about the annual San Quentin Prison Marathon. “Working up towards that marathon, when someone suddenly can run five miles, that’s a huge confidence builder.

“Keep in mind, these are people who are deemed as society’s failures, who have not accomplished much in life. Less than 1% of the population ever completes a marathon, so completing it means that they not only gain entrée into an elite group of athletes that are on the outside as well but, for that day they are runners, they are not criminals.”

Six years in the making, Yoo’s film combines the photogenic glory of athletics with the quotidian details – inmates working odd jobs, writing letters – of the daily life at San Quentin, a maximum security facility whose past brushes with fame include country singer Johnny Cash performing live. 26.2 to Life also paints portraits of the inmates, many of whom are serving life sentences with little prospect of parole.

They speak about their motives for putting themselves through the punishing 26.2-mile race with all its mental and physical demands. One explains: “It allows you to feel like you’re doing something normal. Like you’re doing something that’s not prison.”

Fighting back tears on camera, John Levin says: “I do think about my crime so in a sense it’s like kind of penance for my crime. I kind of feel like, OK, I caused so much suffering and pain in my victim and my victim’s family that some of that pain is – that I deserve some suffering as well, so that’s part of it.”

Yoo, 55, felt a personal connection with the subject. More than 20 years ago she befriended Hyun Kang, a Korean-American man from a similar background who was wrongly convicted and sentenced to 271 years in California state prison. After 26 years behind bars, he was finally released last year.

Hyun Kang’s experience made Yoo think about the impact of incarceration on the individual, family and community. “Back when he was sentenced, that was the ‘tough on crime’ era when there was no hope of getting out,” she says via video chat from Los Angeles.

“The idea of the fact that he may be spending the rest of his living days inside a prison got me thinking, how does one actually do that? If you have to carry out the rest of your living days in prison, what does that look like and how would I go about doing that?”

Then, in 2016, Yoo read an article in GQ magazine about the San Quentin prison marathon, which has been taking place annually since 2008, and realised that she had the perfect narrative device to explore such questions. “It immediately captured my attention,” she recalls. “I’ve done running – I’m not a marathoner; the longest distance I’ve run is 15 miles – but I certainly have experienced a sense of freedom that comes from running and of course running is one of the most cinematic things to capture.”

Yoo kept thinking about Vincent Van Gogh’s painting Prisoners Exercising. It took her about nine months for her to gain multiple-entry access to San Quentin. She met Frank Ruona, coach of the 1000 Mile Club, founded in 2005 as a long-distance running club for incarcerated men. She watched a half-marathon and was taken by surprise.

“It was festive. You don’t expect festivities inside of prison. I thought it was very strange. I was trying to reconcile this joyous, buoyant atmosphere with being inside San Quentin prison. After talking with the guys and everything, I just felt like I need to get out of the way and let these guys tell their story. I felt that the story would be better told as a non-fiction piece.”

Yoo was moved by the way in which Ruona took a personal passion and created a community that changed lives, not just incarcerated people but also volunteers who used to support the death penalty. “We all can do something to help change the system that we’re in,” she says.

She visited the prison often when the cameras were not rolling, getting to know the staff, becoming part of the community and even running on the track herself. She volunteered at the prison’s media centre and, by the end of the process, was working with a totally incarcerated crew for pick-up shots and the film’s music soundtrack.

San Quentin’s prison cells, shared between two people, are tiny. “It’s basically like two people living in your bathroom.” What else did she observe about day-to-day existence there? “Life goes on and people have choices, just like they do out here.

“It’s a hidden world but at the same time you have choices to make inside. You can either do bad or do good. You can do drugs and all of that stuff is available to you or the guys who are concerned about getting out take it upon themselves to undertake the difficult internal work.

“Many of them have a very high emotional intelligence that I also felt that could serve the public. They have the answers to all ills that we have out here and could provide a lot of assistance. Many of these guys, with the punitive sentencing laws that came out of the super predator era, are looking at decades long sentences.

“Data shows that people age out of crime. People commit crimes when they’re young; I did a bunch of stupid stuff when I was young too; we all did. Obviously there are there are degrees of that but the punitive sentencing laws are just not helping our situation here.”

Last year Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, announced that San Quentin State Prison would be renamed San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, focused on improving public safety through rehabilitation and education. Based on what she witnessed, Yoo is convinced that rehabilitation works.

“I had no idea what rehabiliation was before I started this whole process, In fact, I all have always felt it’s an empty word and I do still kind of feel it’s an empty word. I feel like transformation is a much better word.

“People in prison generally don’t have access to family. A lot of them come from broken families. A lot of them didn’t have access to education and they’re generally poor and disproportionately Black and brown and many of them were addicted to drugs. There is a phrase that you hear inside the walls of a lot: hurt people hurt people.”

There is no better example of transformation than Tommy Wickerd, incarcerated for several violent crimes, who works with deaf people inside the prison and ran its inaugural American sign language class. He has 30 years left on his sentence; the film’s official website invites people to petition Newsom to commute it so Wickerd can reunite with his wife and family.

Yoo says: “Here was a guy who basically didn’t get past the fourth grade, was a case of failing up. The classic case of getting arrested over something stupid and getting into the prison system. His early adulthood was then shaped by the prison system. He was already on his path of transformation but it blossomed with the 1000 Mile Club and what he is doing now inside San Quentin is absolutely amazing in terms of the deaf community there. It’s a real damn shame that this guy cannot get out.”

San Quentin’s location in the Bay Area, a progressive stronghold, means that its inmates benefit from more local volunteers and community engagement than a typical prison in a remote rural area. But Yoo is working with the coaches on developing a handbook advising incarcerated people on how to self-start a prison running club that will be distributed free around the country.

“Since the movie has been out, we have received a ton of inbound emails from different prisons that want more information about how to start a prison running club. Apparently there have been a few clubs that have started after people saw the film. There’s a very small barrier for entry for a running programme. You basically need a space. These guys don’t even necessarily need running shoes; when the club first started, some of these guys were running in boots.”

For Ruona, it is not about the worst thing a person did in their past. At the end of the film, he says simply: “I just feel like I am my brother’s keeper. If he needs help, I’m gonna try and help him and I feel like these guys over there, they need help and they appreciate whatever help they get.”

• 26.2 to Life is now available on ESPN+ in the US with a UK date to be announced