For some of the men currently serving time in the Utah State Correctional Facility, running is a special privilege.
Running a marathon is an even greater opportunity.
In a fenced-in field with a paved circle, a few dozen men ran 26.2 miles Friday in the prison’s first-ever Fit From Within marathon — some jogged, others walked and even a few did the race in a wheelchair.
The men who participated had been training for months, having raced in a half-marathon last July, when former inmate Casey Vanderhoef won it in about 99 minutes. On Friday, he cheered on his friends from the sidelines.
Vanderhoef was paroled on July 22, which happened to be his 22nd wedding anniversary and just days after the half-marathon. He’s now working in the cooks program at the Northern Utah Community Corrections Center, where he’ll finish in February.
“The fact that I walked in the front door and will get to walk out the front door has been really great,” he told the Deseret News. “The prison, to me, represents a great place of healing, and so to come back here and help support and cheer these men on in their journey has been a great opportunity. I’m really grateful for it.”
He joked that purchasing good running shoes was one thing he’ll never take for granted again since entering parole. He even runs to all his appointments around town now.
Vanderhoef previously told the Deseret News that running saved his life. On Friday, he reiterated that message. It doesn’t matter if you’re incarcerated or not — mental and physical health go hand in hand.
Running helped Vanderhoef deal with the “stresses of incarceration” and helped him repair relationships with his family and community.
“Transitioning now to being on parole, the stresses are much different. They’re not the same stresses, but they’re equally challenging,” he explained. “Going through different types of rejection in the job search, or being patient, as now my children are older and just learning what kind of support they need.”
“So still having a routine of running, still having that helps my brain reset, that helps me engage and feel the feelings without the old days where I used to just run into my different drug of choice to run away from the feelings,” he said. “Now I run to process the feelings.”
Running for connection
Anyone at the prison on Friday would have felt the infectious happiness of the runners and volunteers jogging alongside them.
Courtney Wayment, a competitor in the 2024 Paris Olympics steeplechase, came to support the men along with members of the Run Elite Program, of which she is also a member. She told the Deseret News she had never seen anything like the event.
Running, she said, “is something that connects all of us, and it’s something that brings people together. Every three laps on the path is a mile, so to reach a marathon distance, the inmates had to run the loop nearly 80 times.
“The New York Marathon just happened, and the Chicago Marathon just happened. And so you think of those, and they’re running through cities, and they have people lining the streets, and they get to cheer people on, and it’s a whole different experience,” she emphasized, showing the mental strength that the men have to be running in their situation.
“We’ve been able to run with them, and we’ve been able to walk with some of them, and so you get to hear their stories and just their life journey,” Wayment added. “I think it’s really, really special, to be honest.”
The idea for Fit from Within came from both the book “Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain” and the documentary “26.2 to Life,” a story about men detained at a facility in Santa Barbara, California, who are members of the 1000 Mile Club, the prison’s long-distance running club.
Fonua Kimoana, who helped found the running club at the prison, told the Deseret News that the program is changing lives, including his own. “We’re taking the labels away and we’re treating each other as human beings,” he said. “It’s rough in here, you know, I’ve been here since 2008, and sometimes days go up and down, but I want to be able to regulate all of those feelings,” and running helps with the process.
He said he ran today, thinking of his mother who passed away earlier this week.
“Being able to start this run and have a connection with her, it was a game-changer for me, you know, being able to regulate my emotions and not go off,” he explained, because the prison atmosphere “is full of uncertainties. But it’s not what the system or anybody’s doing to me, it’s how I’m responding to what’s happening in my surroundings. And so running really did help me throughout all of this.”
