“So, GQ  you know you’re entering hostile territory?” our escort from California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation asks. It’s phrased as a question and delivered as a quip, but it’s meant as a disclaimer—like the regulation alerting all who set foot inside San Quentin’s walls that “hostages will not be recognized for bargaining purposes.” Boilerplate stuff, the fine print of a prison visit, but still: one of many reminders that today’s marathon is not your typical sporting event.

Read More26.2 to Life: Inside the Brutal San Quentin Prison Marathon

105 laps around the yard at America’s largest death row

By Jesse Katz

We’re guided into a medieval fortress—sawtooth battlements, barred windows, latticed gates—past the chapel and the execution chamber and the clinic, all the way through to the 163-year-old facility’s sloped backside, which opens into a four-acre box known as the lower yard. Ringed in spools of razor wire and overseen by sharpshooting guards, it’s packed with killers and rapists and drug traffickers, most well into middle age. On this November day in 2015, two dozen of them will participate in the eighth running of the San Quentin Marathon. “When I’m running,” says Markelle Taylor, who is doing 15 years to life for second-degree murder, “I feel free.” That’s him in the baggy shorts and soggy tank-top, shaved head gleaming in the Northern California sun. He’s loping around the yard at a pace—7:30 per mile—that nobody else can come close to matching, and he’s doing it not because he’s trying to earn favor or attention or an early parole date but because, at 43, he’s at last discovering, he says, that doing right by others begins with believing in his own self-worth. “Before,” Taylor says, “I didn’t love myself.”

For him to run 26.2 miles here means doing 105 laps: 104 full trips around and one slightly abbreviated loop at the end. Other inmates are playing cards, cutting hair, sculpting their biceps. Taylor, for a few hours on a late-autumn morning, appears to have escaped.

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