In January of 2007, at the age of twenty-four, he won the Aramco Houston Half-Marathon in 59:43, shattering the American record by more than a minute, and becoming the first non-African to break the sixty-minute barrier. I profiled Hall in the magazine, in 2008, before the Beijing Olympics, when he was coming off a remarkable string of races. The final outcome was brutal but simple: Ryan Hall, like everybody else, just got slow. Medical tests showed that he had low testosterone levels, but that had been true even during his best days, and a mess of doctors and specialists couldn’t produce a clear diagnosis or solution. He cancelled some races and dropped out of others for nearly four years he failed to run well in any major competition. For Ryan Hall, trouble began with plantar fasciitis, back in 2012, and then he struggled with severe fatigue. In the end, it’s usually not the honors that get worn out it’s the hamstrings, the Achilles, the I.T.B.s. Housman reads differently as one grows older-despite the eternal and sentimental appeal of a track-star funeral, I often wish that the poet had illuminated a path for the vast majority of us who are destined to limp away from the sport. I thought of those lines when I heard about the sudden retirement of Ryan Hall, who is by far the fastest American-born marathoner of all time, and who earlier this month quit the sport at the age of thirty-three, after a period of steep physical decline.
Now you will not swell the rout Of lads that wore their honours out, Runners whom renown outran And the name died before the man.
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