Excerpt from NY Times:
Dathan Ritzenhein, 27, was the top American finisher in the Olympic marathon in Beijing and is among the favorites in New York.
He will be among the favorites at the New York City Marathon on Nov. 7, and is expected to battle Meb Keflezighi, the defending champion and 2004 Olympic silver medalist from San Diego, and Haile Gebrselassie, the world-record holder from Ethiopia. But Ritzenhein’s career has been as undulating in the last two years as the New York course, full of rises and depressions and unexpected turns caused by feet that have alternately elevated and betrayed him.
At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Ritzenhein was the top United States finisher, taking ninth place in brutal heat. Last year, he set an American track record, since broken, of 12 minutes 56.27 seconds for 5,000 meters, then won a bronze medal in the half-marathon at the world championships. A former high school phenom from Rockford, Mich., he had shouldered expectation and blossomed into an elite international professional at 26.
He had a new coach, Alberto Salazar, a former great marathoner, and a career on the ascent. He was the Ritz, his alter ego, the aspiring toughest guy in the race, the one who hung with the leaders, who countered every surge, who put everything on the line every time he stepped on the track and the roads.
Great runners, though, are as finely tuned and fragile as racecars, always at that redlining edge between extreme speed and mechanical agony. From November to July, Ritzenhein’s running was frequently interrupted, sometimes halted, by inflammation, a stress fracture and a cyst in his right foot. He has raced little in the last year. Only recently has he been running pain free.
Meanwhile, the New York race is only three weeks away. Before injury hobbled his training, Ritzenhein planned this to be a glorious return to the marathon, a head-to-head battle with Gebrselassie. And it still could be.
If Ritzenhein lowers his personal best of 2 hours 10 minutes and perhaps runs 2:08, he could win or finish in the top three. But he cannot be quite as aggressive as he once planned and must check his pride, knowing he will be ready but perhaps not as ready as he will be at his next marathon in the spring. He has been running 120 miles a week but says that ultimately, he will have to run 130 or 140.
“I wouldn’t count myself out of winning, but I’m not going to think that I’m going to win and it’s a failure otherwise,” Ritzenhein, now 27, said Wednesday.
“If I run 2:08 to 2:10 range, that will put me on the podium, probably. I think I can do that, judging by my workouts. I’ll just have to be a little smarter, as opposed to do-or-die and being right there with every surge. If I can run that in New York, I know I can turn around next spring in London and run 2:06. That would be a big confidence booster.”
He suspects that his recent foot problems are because of, in part, the law of unintended consequences.
Salazar thinks that form is as important for distance runners as for sprinters. He changed Ritzenhein’s posture and stride, admonishing him to hold his arms higher, to bend less at the waist and quit hunching his shoulders, to keep his chest and hips out for a more forceful and efficient stride.
“Ethiopians and Kenyans are running 160 miles a week, more than you will ever run, because it’s their only way out, and those who survive that are going to be really hard to beat unless you do everything perfectly,” Salazar told Ritzenhein. “If they have better biomechanics, too, you are in trouble.”
Ritzenhein also altered the way his foot struck the ground. He tended to strike toward the back of his foot, near the heel, which applied a braking motion to each stride. This could be a significant factor over 26.2 miles.
Salazar encouraged him to strike at the midfoot or toward the forefoot. But as Ritzenhein practiced the new stride, he developed irritation of the tendon-sheathed and jelly-bean-size sesamoid bones behind his right big toe. Training through that injury in February, he developed a stress fracture in the metatarsal bone on the middle toe of his right foot.
A similar problem had affected his left foot since 2004, when Ritzenhein fractured a metatarsal and limped home during the 10,000-meter race at the Olympic trials. Now his other foot had broken down. “He was devastated,” Salazar said.
A mad tinkerer and devotee of duct tape, Salazar tried to alleviate the pain by constructing various pads and cutouts in the inserts of Ritzenhein’s shoes. In retrospect, they said, these well-meaning fixes might have exacerbated the problem instead of remedying it.
Ritzenhein’s new coach, Alberto Salazar, right, altered his running mechanics, which has helped him to run pain free.
In the spring, Nike, which sponsors Ritzenhein in the Oregon Project running program, did biomechanical and force-plate analyses of his feet. It was determined that he struck the ground with 15 percent more force than the average person in the area of the third metatarsal. And he may be predisposed to stress fractures because of a structural anomaly of his second toe, which is long and impinges on the third toe, curving at the tip like a periscope as if searching to make sure the other digits are in proper alignment.
Gordon Valiant, Nike’s head of biomechanical research, devised an insert for Ritzenhein’s shoes that features a slight depression beneath the third metatarsal. The insert is “not a cure; it is a Band-Aid,” Salazar said that Valiant had cautioned. But it helps disperse the force of each stride more evenly across the forefoot.
Ritzenhein began running again in early July, but a cyst had formed below his right foot, in the joint of the third metatarsal. He resumed full training even though it was too painful to walk barefooted. Finally, in mid-August, the cyst popped.
“It was excruciating,” Ritzenhein said. “I thought I had done something really bad. But the pain went away overnight. It’s the first miracle cure I’ve had.”
His recent training has been encouraging. Under Salazar, Ritzenhein has added more speed workouts: 8 to 10 repeats of 200 meters in 29 to 30 seconds on a track, then on a hill. And four repeats of 1,600 meters (4:37), 1,200 meters (3:24), 800 meters (2:14) and 400 meters (63 to 64 seconds).
“You get the muscles used to higher, faster workloads and marathon pace feels slower,” Salazar said.
This month, Ritzenhein is also making day trips to sea level at Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., for tempo runs of 15 to 20 miles at marathon pace of sub-five minutes per mile, which is not possible here at 6,000 feet. He has opted to do one Monday instead of running Sunday in a half-marathon in mile-high Denver.
At Nike, he is also refining his race-day hydration techniques to reduce the risk of cramping and a loss of energy. Previously, Ritzenhein tended to overhydrate with water before a marathon, leaving him with too few electrolytes during the race. Meanwhile, he ingested 1,200 calories as he ran, carbohydrates that his body could not fully absorb. Now he plans to reduce race-day carbohydrates and begin drinking electrolyte-rich sports drinks for the next few weeks.
“I’ll have a lot of cavities afterward, but I can replace my teeth if I have a good marathon,” he said with a laugh.
On Sept. 19, Ritzenhein faced Gebrselassie at the Great North Run, a half-marathon in England. Gebrselassie won in 59:33; Ritzenhein went out too fast and finished a disappointing fourth in 62:35. He was still the Ritz in his head, but not in his legs.
The hills and bridges of New York will surely prevent Gebrselassie from breaking his marathon world record, 2:03:59. But, at 37, he could challenge the course record, 2:07:43. If Gebrselassie goes out at 2:07 pace, Salazar said he would probably instruct Ritzenhein to let him go and perhaps aim for 2:08.
“The public might say that’s defeatist, that you got to go for it and if you die, you die,” Salazar said. “That might sound romantic, but it’s stupid. You don’t want to risk falling apart and losing too much in terms of his development.”
Yet Ritzenhein is a superb cross-country runner, which seemingly suits him to New York’s heaving course. And Gebrselassie, who prefers flat courses staged for world-record attempts, has sometimes struggled when facing top competition on robust terrain. New York also does not allow pacemakers, which he prefers.
“Who knows, he could blow up,” Ritzenhein said. “He’s not invincible, even though he looks like it sometimes. One thing you’ve got to remember: everybody is beatable.”
