By Rachel Levin, San Francisco Chronicle, December 20, 2019
“I’m not a betting man, but if I was, I’d put my money on Fidelio,” says Markelle “The Gazelle” Taylor, winner of the 12th annual San Quentin Marathon — and the three before that. He isn’t running this year. The 26.2-mile race, held inside the 30-foot walls of what’s got to be the prettiest prison in America, is for inmates only.
Prettiest, at least, when viewed from the outside, where the sparkling San Francisco Bay stretches to the sky and Mount Tamalpais rises above the barbed wire.
The Gazelle always appreciated that view of Tam while running around and around and around the prison yard. He completed his last San Quentin Marathon — 105 laps around a quarter-mile track — in a record 3:10:42. A few months later, paroled after 18 years, he ran to the top of the mountain he’d been looking at for so long. (And then he ran the Boston Marathon, in 3:03:52, his personal best.)
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