Ryan Shay and Ryan Hall lined up side by side at the starting line of the U.S. Men’s Olympic Marathon Trials on a brisk Saturday morning in New York’s Central Park. Hall quickly ran to the head of the lead pack and it wasn’t until midway though the race that Shay caught back up with Hall, though he was riding in the back of an ambulance, and he was dead.

If you look through Runners World or any other fitness magazine, you might see Ryan Shay in a full-page advertisement for Team EAS’s sports drink. He’s galloping along comfortably but sternly, hair bounced high in the air, leading a herd of wild-eyed mustangs. That’s probably exactly how Shay looked on the night before the trials when he went on a shakeout run with his close friend Ryan Hall, the eventual winner of the race.

In fact, right up until the moment he collapsed at the 5.5 mile marker, 28-year old Ryan “The Workhorse” Shay probably looked like he could have won the race. In a split second Shay went from one of the best-conditioned athletes on the planet gliding along the Central Park course to a motionless heap of glistening skin and Dry-FIT polyester on the cold pavement. By some accounts, Shay was dead before he hit the ground, and the ambulance carrying him past the race leaders was in no hurry to the hospital. There was no time at all between an outside shot at going the Beijing Olympics and complete heart failure, and that’s something that the close-knit long distance running community has been trying to cope with ever since the Trials.

But to call the elite distance running community “close-knit” undersells the situation by, well, a marathon. For many of the finishers in the top half of the Marathon Trials, Ryan Shay was a roommate, a friend for whom they knew every quirk and could be recognized merely by the sound of his breath. Just this past July Ryan Shay had married Alicia Craig, a Stanford teammate of Ryan Hall and his wife, Sara, who was a bridesmaid at the ceremony.

Like most elite distance runners, Ryan Shay was forced to train long miles, sometimes up to 140 a week, by himself unless he was in a training group, one of only a few around the nation. Little families of runners train together each season in places like Eugene, Oregon, Boulder, Colorado, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Palo Alto, Mammoth Lakes and Chula Vista, California. They cling to these groups for competition, a sense of team, friendship, the chance to get better, and sometimes for a soul mate.

Months ago Shay was living at “The Woodside House” with several other runners. Woodside House, a small, damp cabin in the hills outside the Bay Area, became a kind of commune/summer camp/Breakfast Club for a half dozen Olympic hopefuls for a few rainy months.

The cast of characters who came to Woodside House was rag-tag and diverse enough to almost work as a live-action Disney plot.

There was Gabe Jennings, who grew up in Northern California in a home with no indoor plumbing. A Stanford alum, he’s one of the best middle distance runners in the U.S. when he’s not riding his bicycle to South America on a whim. Written off too many times as a hippie, Jennings is more accurately described as a free spirit.

Gabe’s life perspective might have clashed nicely with Ryan Shay, who grew up in Michigan, ran at Notre Dame, reads Bill O’Reilly and doesn’t mind telling you about it.

Then there’s the newlywed Halls, Ryan and Sara, who were teammates at Stanford. They sign their autographs with their favorite bible verses and have a shared dream of living in Latin America to do-good for the poor.

The patriarch of the family, Mebrahtom Keflezighi, escaped war-torn Eritrea when he was a child, earned his U.S. citizenship and has been The Man in American long distance running for a long, long time. Meb used to live with Ryan Shay at the U.S. Training facility near San Diego, California.

The group also included other long distance elites, all of whom brought their own story to Woodside House. Through journals collected by New York Road Runners, we can see that the house was touch-and-go for a while. Ryan Shay wrote in his journal,

“It did not take me long to recognize the different personalities of my new teammates. Right out of college, with either newly acquired, or more reinforced philosophies, ideologies, and values, my new teammates where not short of opinions and views on any and all topics. Most of the time conversation, or debates were kept civil. I always welcome intellectual stimulation. Aside from differences in the political, moral, and religious fronts, there were also differences in personalities and lifestyles and most of the time I can be pretty obnoxious. I like to demonstrate absurdity by being absurd. I don’t mind confrontation. In fact, I welcome it, when others avoid it. I soon found out that some of the others I was living with were not so welcoming…”

Mike McKeeman, who lived at Woodside during that time, recalled in his journal:

“There was never a dull moment, as we engaged in discussions of world events, spoke of history and philosophy, watched countless episodes of Alias and Family Guy, and made fun of certain people in the house for eating too much butter.”

The team bonded over many, many miles on the trails, shared ice baths in the broken hot tub, shared meals in the cramped kitchen, and the phrase “this never happens,” when applied to anything out of the ordinary. The unusually rainy weather during Woodside House was the first thing that Bay Area regulars deemed to never happen. As with phrases that become popular among peers, “this never happens” devolved into its own instantly laughable joke.

Ryan Shay wrote in the final passages of his journal that he’d “come to know and respect” his teammates. He loved how “the chemistry of the team, with all the different personalities… produced an environment conducive to enormous opportunities for each athlete.”

Deena Kastor, the team mother figure, couldn’t help but bubble over with happiness at everybody’s friendship:

“We have made a great team this year. As Grease is finishing I have to enjoy the last song. I have no idea what the lyrics mean, but the song is about being together, and it makes me feel good. This is the same way I feel with the people that surround me every day. It’s the team that I know I can count on… “We go together like rama lama lama ke ding a de dinga a dong/Remembered for ever like shoo bop shoo wadda wadda yipitty boom de boom.”

After the rain subsided, the house was abandoned as some runners went off to Europe to race and others stayed in America to train or recover from injuries. Months later Shay married Alicia Craig, who had stayed at Woodside House to train for the Olympic 10,000 Meters.

The Marathon Trials would reunite the family once again. The Shays and the Halls went for tandem runs on the evening before the race. The new brides went for a longer loop than the men, who had to save energy for the next day. Sara’s Ryan had just bought a house in Big Bear, California, and oh, it’s just lovely the Shays should come visit. Wouldn’t it be something if both of the husbands made Beijing? I hope they line up tomorrow so we can get a good picture of them together at the start.

The next morning Alicia was a widow. Minutes after being informed of Shay’s passing, Ryan Hall was staring blankly out at the equally astonished media during a winners circle press conference where everyone simply went through the motions.

Shay was so young, so fit. He’d run longer, faster so many times before. He’d shown no signs of anything wrong, health-wise. How could it be? Sometimes a random overweight and overzealous runner will die in a hot, humid marathon, but this wasn’t the case at all. This never happens.