Christine Yoo’s intelligent, compassionate and deeply moving film, 26.2 to Life: Inside the San Quentin Prison Marathon, follows some of the inmates of the California maximum-security facility. The men, most of whom are serving life sentences, are preparing to run 100-odd laps of the heavily guarded prison yard, along a barely marked track, weaving in and out of prisoners who do not know or care to stay out of their way. All of them are subject at any time to a minor or major lockdown that will interrupt or even cancel the race for which they have trained all year. They can wear non-prison-issue clothes to run in, but their shoes are the property of the state and have to be booked in and out by each man at every session.
The 1000 Mile Club, as the runners are known, are trained by a group of volunteers led by Franklin Ruona, an experienced marathon man himself. A naturally quiet and watchful soul, he doesn’t talk to the men about their crimes unless they want to. His view is that they are people who have not had his luck or advantages: “I just feel like I am my brother’s keeper,” he says. In the febrile prison atmosphere, he is an oasis of calm.
Yoo focuses on a handful of Frank’s charges, cutting between the unfolding race and the unfolding of their stories in a way that shows how much discipline running has brought to their lives, and the meaning it has given to their years inside – even those with virtually no prospect of release. But as they pound time after time around the dusty yard, it also illustrates the waste and futility of the actions that brought them to this point. Yoo interviews the prisoners in their cells about their backstories and their crimes – murder and manslaughter, generally with many years’ “enhancements” added on for the use of guns – and we are asked to contextualise, but not forgive (especially when Yoo goes beyond the prison walls to interview inmates’ family members). That said, it is clear that, as in most documentaries of this ilk, we are being told only one version of each story; we do not hear anything from the victims.
Nevertheless, the profound and systemic poverty, the endemic drug trade and violence in certain cities all over the US remains extraordinary. Most of the men talk about growing up with violent or drug-addicted parents, and not knowing what to do with their anger as they grew up. It is as much a portrait of masculinity as the straitening it represents – the repression, the emotional illiteracy, the sheer loneliness of it, which explodes outwards and hands on misery to other men and often to the wives, girlfriends and other women in their way.
And yet, there is earned hope here. In Rahsaan, originally sentenced to 55-to-life for second degree murder, but gradually returning to his roots as a child who was a computer whiz and in the gifted class at school, and throwing himself into work as a mentor, journalist and participant in non-profit news organisation the Marshall Project. In Tommy Wickerd (“Bullshit is what I believed in,” he says of his swastika tattoos), who is working hard towards his GED and repairing the damage his incarceration has done to his son. In Markelle “the Gazelle” Taylor, the child of a horrifically abusive stepfather, a talented high-school athlete (his participation in the San Quentin Marathon theoretically qualifies him for the Boston marathon), whose early experiences turned him into a violent drunk whose involvement in the death of a premature baby is hard to consider with equanimity.
There are points – during Markelle’s account of his crimes, for instance – where you feel 26.2 to Life has a moral duty to push harder, that it is in danger of letting the uplifting narrative (the power of sport to unite men, the Corinthian spirit finding its way into the prison yard) exert too strong a pull. But in the main, it stays clear-eyed and crosses the finish line in fine form.
