Runner's World Ritz Interview

By Peter Gambaccini

Dathan Ritzenhein was second in the 10,000-meter run (behind Galen Rupp) at the USATF Championships in 27:58.59 and will compete in that event at the World Championships in Berlin in August. Ritzenhein was 11th at the Flora London Marathon in April in a personal best 2:10:00; he'd been ninth in the Beijing Olympic marathon in 2:11:59 after taking second at the U.S. Men’s Olympic Marathon Trials in New York in 2:11:07. Ritzenhein finished second to Meb Keflezighi at the 2009 USA Half-Marathon Championships in Houston January in 1:01:35. In 2008, he was the USA Cross Country champion (he'd also won that title in 2005) and placed eighth in the 10,000 at the U.S. Olympic Track & Field Trials in Eugene in 28:05.31. He was ninth in the 10,000 at the 2007 World Championships. His personal bests on the track are 13:16.61 for 5000 meters and 27:35.65 for 10,000. Ritzenhein was the 2003 NCAA Cross Country champion while at the University of Colorado, and a 2004 U.S. Olympian in the 10,000. He was a bronze medalist in World Junior Cross Country in 2000 and a two-time Foot Locker Cross Country champion while in high school in Michigan. Ritzenhein and his wife, former Colorado star Kalin Toedebusch, are parents of a 21-month-old daughter, Addison,

Our Chat took place a little bit later than at its scheduled afternoon time because ... well, because Ritzenhein was asleep. This inspired the opening queries regarding sleep.

Do you get a lot of sleep, like more than eight or nine hours?
Dathan Ritzenhein: I try. I do pretty well, usually, because my wife takes the baby all the time and lets me sleep in a little bit. I try to get a nap in the afternoon. That tends to help me get another hour or so. I don't sleep like a college kid anymore, that's for sure.

Years ago, Anne Marie (Lauck) Letko used to tell us not to call her after 8:30 p.m., and I think you're not supposed to call Deena Kastor after 9:00 or 9:30 because the assumption is she'll already me in bed.
DR: Well, (Bernard) Lagat doesn't go to bed until like 2 a.m. He's a night owl.

Wow. Does he make up for it in the morning?
DR: Yeah, I think he sleeps until like 11:00. He has kids, too. I don't know how he gets away with it.

Right after the London Marathon, how quickly did you decide you wanted to do the 10,000 at the USATF Championships? It was a fairly short interval of time between the two. Obviously you recovered pretty well from London. Were you pretty confident of that recovery?
DR: It (the 10,000) was always in the back of my head, and I wanted to make that (Worlds) team. That was actually a bigger goal earlier in the year than running a spring marathon. I knew it would be a quick turnover and a quick push, but I just hoped that the kind of foundational aerobic training I had from the marathon would carry me over and I could just shift over into some faster speed stuff. I had to take a little rest, but I came around fairly well. I was a little banged up after the marathon. I had some ongoing calf problems. Luckily, things panned out. I had a good three of four weeks beforehand (before USATFs) and things kind of came together.

You'd split with your coach, Brad Hudson, after the London Marathon. I know you had some contact with Alberto Salazar before the recent announcement that he was your new coach. But during the training period before USATFS, were you pretty much the captain of your own ship, as it were?
DR: At first, when I split with Brad, I talked with Alberto just briefly. It wasn't until about Pre Classic time, in early June, that we started talking a little bit more. We didn't talk about training at all. We were just trying to see if it would be a good fit with me and his group up there and which direction we wanted to go. For me, it (the training before USATFs) was just stuff that I knew I had done during my best track seasons. My wife was out there timing me at the track, and bringing the dog and the kid. She was doing it all. It was a big help. Otherwise, it can be hard to go to the track by yourself and not have anybody there to hold you accountable. It's easy to stop workouts or slack off. I really just had to put my nose to the grindstone and do what had worked in the past before.

Other than the little calf problems, did you feel pretty fresh, with no burnout? I did see a video interview in which you indicated the last couple of weeks of your marathon training before London didn't go all that well. I was wondering if that was an indication of overwork.
DR: The last few weeks were tough. It was a struggle, and there definitely were some lingering effects. But anytime you run a marathon, you're going to be exhausted for awhile afterward. Some coaches think it takes a lot longer to come back than others. And normally, I would never have that quick a turnaround, but just to try to make the team (in the 10,000), I had to. I was a little fatigued for a few weeks, for sure, going in, and it had been almost two years since I had done any real track training, so that made it an even harder transition for me. For me, it was really a matter of just toughing through those hard weeks and just trying to get the rhythm back in my legs after going at marathon pace the last two years. I did that (5000-meter) race in Toronto two weeks beforehand (before USATFs), and that was something that I needed to break up that monotonous moderate feeling of the marathon and try and get back into the intense feeling of working hard and racing at those shorter 5k/10k distances (Ritzenhein ran 13:34.00 for 5000 meters in Toronto on June 11, finishing second).

You'd been talking about doing something in the 2:06 or 2:07 range in London. Wouldn't that have required going out with harder group for the first half than you ultimately chose to do?
DR: No, because the first pace group ended up going out in 61 something. Our group was supposed to go out in 2:07:30, and that's that we went through in. We were right on it. It just so happened that it was in one of the deepest marathons. It was just crazy how deep the field was. We actually went out really fast the first 10k, but it's slightly downhill, so it's a little deceptive. But we were on it (the pace), but things didn't go well in the last few weeks of marathon training. The whole pack kind of came undone, so I think it was a fast pace we went out at.

You mentioned after that race that you didn't think you'd gotten your electrolytes situation squared away to your liking. Is that right?
DR: I think so, and some of it might have been general muscle fatigue just from being out fast and having bad training the last few weeks. I mean, I missed a whole week of training three weeks beforehand (before London). But I could tell there were some electrolyte problems. I met with a nutritionist on it and I think there are definitely some things that I can change, some overhydration problems that I've done in the weeks and days leading up to the race. You wash out the sodium and things like that that are necessary. It's a matter of drinking too much straight water until a couple of days beforehand. It takes a few days for your body to catch up. If you drink only water for two weeks and then you switch to sports drinks a couple of days before the race, it still doesn't have the desired effect.

You've mentioned you still have an enchantment with the marathon, but do you think you might skip a cycle of marathon training, and perhaps not do a marathon in the fall, so you can continue to work on some of the "long speed," as you've described it?
DR: Yeah, at the moment we're hoping to do more speed-oriented stuff right now. I want to do one (a marathon) because I love to do it, but right now, I need to focus in one having a good track season. If all goes well and I get the biomechanics back right - that's the biggest thing with working with Alberto, we're going to shift back to focusing a lot on form and and body mechanics and speed, not neglecting the marathon stuff, 'cause that's really my event and my passion, but trying to develop the lower end of it, and when that's really strong, coming back to it, almost like a rebirth into the marathon, I guess.

So that next marathon might not happen until 2010?
DR: Yeah, maybe not. We just have to see how things develop with my strength and my speed and everything like that.

Is there something specific in the biomechanical area you can point to that you're worried about?
DR: I think there's something called "marathon legs," a pretty standard term. If you see someone who's done a lot of marathoning and they're a little older, they tend to shuffle, they tend to back off the efficient stride you see with people like (Kenenisa) Bekele and (Haile) Gebrselassie who are strong and up front and on their toes, almost, more. They look like a middle distance runner, and that's efficiency. I lost a little bit of that, I think, and I wanted to get back to that a few times. I just got sucked back into the marathon. I've got to be honest with myself, too.

When you get to the 10,000 at the USATF Championships in Eugene, was that the kind of pace you expected to be running at?
DR: I expected it to be faster initially. I was surprised that it was as slow as it was. I had, as a backup plan, to try to think the pack out if it was really slow at halfway, but I didn't think I would have to do that. I figured I would make a big push from about a mile out or so; I figured it would be 27:30, 27:40 pace. I thought it would have gone faster up front, and so I made the decision to try and break the pack up a little bit. That was between 4k and 5k, when I made the first initial. That broke it down to about five people, and then about two laps after that, keep trying to increase the pace, and then slow it down, and just gradually increase the distance I would make out of each push so it would be harder for the people holding on.

One of the things we've seen Alberto Salazar's people do - we've seen Galen Rupp do it often, and Kara Goucher, and now Amy Yoder Begley - is to run really hard from as much as 600 meters out. It makes a lot of sense, but it's not something we've traditionally seen a lot of in this country. It seems to be something Alberto specifically works on. Have you talked to him about that in particular, by any chance?
DR: It's something that we want to develop out of our game plan. I think especially on this level, it's good, but when you look at the best athletes in the world, like Bekele and those guys, they make those big pushes from a long way out. You have to be prepared for it, so that's something we need to prepare now for, to be able to go like that. Hopefully, I can bring the strength I have and add it with that.

Do you know specifically, in training, what they do to develop that?
DR: We haven't gotten into it a lot. I know he thinks I have a lot of strength and aerobic background but I really lack the general speed training that I used to do, I guess, when I used to run a little bit faster. For me, that's going to be a huge thing, developing some year-round speed that I've lacked before. I've devoted a lot of time to threshold training, and we'll keep that in.... Some of the stuff that Galen does, compared to some of the fast workouts that I would do, is pretty amazing, so I need to get in with him and really make that big change.

Just from a logistical point of view, you're in Eugene and Alberto is in Portland and Jerry Schumacher's group is in Portland. Do you think you'll be making two or three trips a week to Portland?
DR: We're going to move up there, actually.

So would the workouts involve both Galen and some of Schumacher's people (Matt Tegenkamp, Chris Solinsky, Tim Nelson, and Evan Jager)?
DR: I think there's some crossover, but definitely, there's a separation in coaches as well. To tell you the truth, I haven't been up there yet. I 'm just going to have as much faith in Alberto as possible and just let him go ahead and tell me what to do.

What racing do you expect to go before going to Berlin?
DR: I'm going to go into a strength training cycle right now. I could tell in the 10k that I lacked the hard anaerobic type long intervals that it takes to run a 10k. I'll have to go into this next training cycle and hit it really hard. We're going to spend a lot of time at Portland, spend a lot of time at the Nike House, and then maybe go over to altitude at St. Moritz beforehand. I'm not sure yet. We're just going to train hard and we ready strengthwise for that fast pace (in Berlin) and then race some afterward instead of doing any racing before the World Championships.

The 10,000 in Berlin is pretty definitely going to be a sub-27:00 race. Do you think you'll be able to hang with that pace in the first half of the race?
DR: It's hard to tell now, but hopefully I will have gained the strength in six weeks and be ready for it. You never know when you get into those races, but if I can make a big improvement on where I was in Osaka (in 2007), considering I've taken two weeks off from track since then, I think it'll be a step in the right direction. I mean, miracles don't happen in a few weeks so I'm going to all of the sudden be a 26:40 guy, but if I can work my way towards getting there and be confident and healthy going in, it's something that I'll be able to build off of, being only 26.

It's interesting how itinerant the life of a professional runner becomes. You made the big move from Colorado to Eugene, and then another move, not quite as big, to Portland. It's almost like chasing a wave for surfers. You've got to go where the good workouts are.
DR: Well, it sucks to have to do that. But it's like any other sport. You get traded to other teams all the time. You go where you're going to excel and where it takes you. And for me to take the next jump and fulfill some of this potential that's been there for awhile, I need to take this move up to Portland and work with Alberto.

Well as long as you don't get traded to the track equivalent of the Washington Nationals, whatever that may be.
DR: Well, that's true.