Alan Webb can’t stand still.
He’s popping from foot to foot, bending and stretching. He rolls his neck, touches his toes. He needs to stay loose for the explosion to come—the start of the 2000 Foot Locker High-School Cross-Country Championships. Webb wears headphones blasting a loud rock beat. Hard, rhythmic, energizing rock. “I like music that gets me pumped up,” he says. “Music that psychs me up.”
Inside his head, guitars shriek and drums reverberate, but on this day Webb hardly hears them. He is distracted by another sound, far more insistent than the music: His own voice. His mantra. His reason for being, in this frozen moment.
Stay with Dathan. Stay with Dathan. Dont let Dathan break you, Stay with Dathan. Stay with Dathan. Don’t let Dathan break you.
Thirty-one other high-school runners line up with Webb at the Foot Locker start, eight from each region of the country—East, South, Midwest, and West. Getting to the final is like making an Olympic team; you must qualify via brutal regional races. The 32 kids pawing the start on the fourth fairway of Disney World’s Oak Trail golf course in Orlando are the best in the country. Some 5000 meters (3.1 miles) later, the winner will be king.
Towering behind the runners is a giant inflated Foot Locker referee in black-and-white stripes. Each regional team starts together and wears a different color—green (East), light blue (South), red (Midwest), and dark blue (West). The temperature has already reached the mid-70s for the 10:10 a.m. start, and a bright sun burnishes the runners’ uniforms. Cross-country may have been born 160 years earlier in England’s wintry mix of cold, rain, and muck, but this is the Disney Technicolor version.
This 2000 Foot Locker final has attracted more attention, by far, than any of the 21 that preceded it. “I called it ‘The Battle of the Century,’“ says Marc Bloom, longtime publisher/editor of The Harrier, a newsletter covering the high-school cross-country scene. “In a normal year, you’d be lucky to have one runner performing at such a superhigh level. That year there were three.”
The three are Webb and Dathan Ritzenhein, both 17, and Ryan Hall, 18. They are well known in high-school circles, but teen runners often produce brilliant efforts and quickly flame out. No one would dare predict that these three would become, as they did, the dominant U.S. distance runners of the next decade.
Webb is a powerhouse from Reston, Virginia. Nine months earlier, as a junior, he had run a 1600-meter relay-leg in 3:59.9 at the Penn Relays. In his senior year, he would become the first (and only) high schooler to ever break 4:00 for the indoor mile. Outdoors, he would go on to crush Jim Ryun’s revered mile record for high schoolers with a mind-boggling 3:53.43—a record that could last for decades. In 2004, Webb would make the USA Olympic Team and in 2007 set a new American record for the mile, 3:46.91, taking down Steve Scott’s 25-year-old mark.
Ritzenhein is the defending champ, an aerobic monster who grew up beside the Hush Puppy shoe factory in Rockford, Michigan. He stands 5’6”, weighs 112 pounds, and looks like a bench warmer on the chess team. But Ritz, as he is known, hasn’t lost a cross-country race in two years. He also has a bountiful future: After graduating from the University of Colorado, where he’d win the 2003 NCAA cross-country championships, Ritzenhein would qualify for the 2004 (10,000 meters) and 2008 (marathon) Olympic teams, and three times win the USATF national cross-country championships. In 2009, he would set a U.S. record for 5000 meters (12:56.27, since lowered by Bernard Lagat) and run the second-fastest half-marathon ever by an American, 60:00.
Hall is from Big Bear Lake, California—population 5,438, with an altitude from 6,700 feet to 9,000 feet. He had attended a Jim Ryun running camp and modeled himself on Ryun’s determination and faith; the next year, he ran 1500 meters in 3:45.12, equivalent to a 4:02 mile. After graduation, Hall would attend Stanford University, where he’d win the 2005 NCAA 5000-meter title. Then he would focus on road races, setting an American record for 20 kilometers and winning the U.S. half-marathon championships in 2007 (in a new U.S.-record time of 59:43). Hall would also win the dramatic 2007 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials in Central Park and place fifth at the 2008 London Marathon with the second-fastest time, 2:06:17, ever run by a U.S. citizen.
“For once, the big dogs all came together in one place to go after each other,” notes veteran TV commentator Toni Reavis. “And they brought such great stories with them—they all had these amazing running pedigrees but different personalities.”
As Webb steadies for the starting gun, he’s preparing himself for, in his own words, “a slaughterfest.” Everyone knows Ritzenhein’s routine. He always screams to the front from the get-go, running to the max, taunting others to match him. Those who take the dare—and there are few—soon regret it. No one can maintain his killer pace. Given that he’s lining up with two four-minute milers, Webb and Hall, it seems a sure thing that Ritz will start fast. He won’t sit around and wait for the big kickers.
“Dathan races like Prefontaine and Salazar,” Reavis observes. “He’s willing to kill himself. You hate to race those kinds of guys, because they will make you hurt really early and really bad.”
At the sound of the gun, Webb digs in and drives forward. He wants to get out clean and fast. For the first 100 yards, he’s careful: A year’s planning and training could vanish in a tumble or spike wound. But Webb’s out smoothly. When he spots an opening to his right, he steers over. Now he’s got a little room.
Webb eyes a runner just ahead of him but realizes it’s not Ritzenhein. Too tall, wrong form. It’s Wesley Keating, from Texas, who’s not a threat. Okay, let him go. Webb relaxes. He has no interest in leading. He only wants to cover Ritz’s every move. A half-mile passes. No change. Keating leads; Webb is still loping a few yards back. The pace couldn’t be any easier. “I felt like we were running slower than five minutes for the mile,” says Webb.
But where’s Ritzenhein? Webb’s curiosity gets the best of him. He’s spent the last five months visualizing a fierce duel with Ritz; he even tacked a photo of Ritzenhein on his bedroom door. Webb has pledged his every corpuscle to hanging with Ritz’s blitzkrieg start. And now the guy isn’t even playing ball. Webb understands peripheral vision. He lets his eyes roll to the right for a quick look-see. No Ritz. He glances left. No Ritz.
What the...?
By 2000, American distance running had flopped to a historical low point. For the first time, only one American male and one female qualified for the Olympic Marathon. At the Sydney Olympics, Christine Clark placed 19th, and Rod DeHaven placed 69th. American runners fared little better on the track, with Jason Pyrah 10th in the 1500, Adam Goucher 13th in the 5000 meters, and Abdi Abdirahman and Meb Keflezighi 10th and 12th, respectively, in the 10,000. No American came close to medaling at a distance beyond 400 meters. In weekend road races, increasing numbers of Kenyans began to claim the top spots in U.S. fixtures like Peachtree, Falmouth, and Bay to Breakers. The same was true in our famous marathons: Boston, New York, Chicago. No American male won any of these in the 1990s.
Yet despite the flagging fortunes of U.S. distance running, accompanied by a near-total lack of newspaper and TV coverage, a new generation of high-schoolers was getting stoked about the sport. Four things spurred their interest: the Internet; the 1996 Atlanta Olympics; a training book by Jack Daniels, Ph.D.; and two feature movies about legendary Oregon star Steve Prefontaine.
The Web led the way, particularly a modest site named Dyestat.com. It was launched in 1998 by John Dye, a midlife federal employee in the U.S. Small Business Administration. Dye had database and Web development skills but little interest in track or running until his teenage children joined the track team at Middletown High in Maryland. Then he decided to compile lists of top local performances to find out how his kids stacked up. Before long, his effort morphed into national Top 100 lists for all boys and girls events, and thousands of young track team members surfed there to see if they were ranked. The message boards also proved irresistible to these early social networkers in spikes. Traffic at Dyestat.com doubled every year in the late 1990s, eventually reaching 2 million page views a month. “I was shocked,” says Dye, whose site has now been absorbed by ESPN’s RISE Web site. “I never planned for any kind of success on that scale.”
“The Internet fed a hunger that was already there but completely unserved,” says Reavis. “It was a new medium for these kids. They had a need, this was their time, and Dyestat opened the doors to their special community.”
The 1996 Atlanta Olympics had its share of problems, and plenty of critics to point them out. But it also produced stellar achievements on the track. Ritzenhein remembers the thrill he felt when fellow Midwesterner Bob Kennedy grabbed the lead two laps from the end of the 5000. Kennedy couldn’t hold on, fading to sixth, but there was no question about his will or the stadium’s thunderous response. Ritzenhein was impressed. Webb doesn’t recall Kennedy’s race. But just ask him about U.S. sprinter Michael Johnson, who won two golds in Atlanta, including a world record for 200 meters. Webb loved Johnson’s businesslike attitude, bruising power, and star quality—not to mention his footwear. “Those gold Nike shoes Johnson wore in Atlanta, they were just so cool,” Webb says.
Another important event was the evolution of coaching. For decades, many high-school running coaches had been hacks from other sports. They understood whistles, stopwatches, and clipboards, but little else. By the 1990s, however, more coaches were “running-boom” veterans with a genuine empathy for their athletes. In 1998, with the publication of Virtual Races With the Best Bling, they gained a technical training manual to match their enthusiasm. Daniels had been anointed “the world’s best running coach” by Runner’s World. His book explained how coaches could individualize workouts with pace-specific training paces for runners of varying abilities. “By the late ‘90s, you began to see a new and wonderful level of coaching across the country,” says Bloom. “A lot of the coaches were using Jack’s book.”
On a visceral level, though, nothing could compare with the late-1990s movies Prefontaine and Without Limits. While Steve Prefontaine fell short of his goal, finishing fourth in the nail-biting 1972 Olympic 5000, and died in a car crash three years later, his message was clear: Go for it. After seeing the movies about Pre’s life, Webb modeled himself after his hero for several years, memorizing and repeating famous Pre quotes like “I run to see who has the most guts.” Ritzenhein found a parallel between Prefontaine’s working-class roots and his own family, particularly his father’s rise from a gas-line grunt to a management position. “Prefontaine worked harder than anyone else, and he put it all on the line every time he raced,” Ritzenhein says. “I adopted that as the way I trained and raced.”
Moments after the race start at the Foot Locker final. He also kept an eye peeled for Ritzenhein. “We knew Dathan was going to go out like a madman,” he says. But Hall and his fellow West runners had another concern: They didn’t want to overextend themselves in the first mile. While the other 24 competitors had enjoyed a two-week rest since their qualifiers, the West runners had only seven days. Most decided to race with caution.
Hall, a chesty 5’11” and 145 pounds with close-cropped blond hair, deliberately didn’t match Webb in the early going. He lagged a little, trusting that it would prove the right tactic. Still, patience wasn’t his strong suit; he soon grew antsy. “My teammates and I got a little bit mired in the middle when the course narrowed,” he says. “It was hard finding room to move. And I couldn’t figure out what Dathan was doing. Where was he?”
Hall was the least experienced of the three, running in his first Foot Locker final, and the most improbable and unpredictable. On his first training run as an eighth-grader, he had somehow survived 15 miles with his dad, Mickey, a 3:07 marathoner. His high school didn’t have a track or cross-country team when he entered ninth grade, so Mickey, a P.E. teacher and baseball coach at Big Bear High, organized “clubs” for Ryan and his friends.
Mickey Hall brought an uncommon wanderlust and curiosity to his coaching. He had lived in Australia in the late 1970s, and there he met the two genius distance coaches from Down Under: New Zealand’s Arthur Lydiard and Australia’s Percy Cerutty. Back home, he and Ryan both attended a Jim Ryun Running Camp in Kansas. The young Hall found himself mesmerized by Ryun’s spectacular high-school running—Ryun had run a 3:55.3 high-school record in 1964—the obstacles he faced later in his track career, and his bedrock Christian faith. Meanwhile, his father peppered camp speaker Jack Daniels with training questions. “It was a huge deal for me to meet Jim Ryun and his family,” Ryan says. “I didn’t feel like just a number at his camp. He was so personal, and such an inspiration.” Back home, Ryan plastered his bedroom with reminders of his new goal—3:59.
Year by year, Mickey Hall gradually increased his son’s training: 45 miles a week, 65 miles, 85 miles, all at Big Bear’s high altitude. Most days Ryan ran medium-effort distance runs. On occasion, his father prescribed steep hill repeats on the local slopes. Following Lydiard, Mickey placed little reliance on speed-work. This frustrated his son, who read Internet posts about other runners’ eye-popping sessions, and wanted to match, or exceed, them himself. After almost every workout, he whined, “Dad, I could have run a lot harder.”
The previous year, Mickey had kept Ryan out of the Foot Locker competitions, sensing that the long California season had depleted his son. He related stories of athletes who burned out from too much racing and speedwork, and of Olympic champions raised on long, moderate distance. Ryan was unmoved. “Coaching Ryan was like working a wild stallion,” Mickey says. “He always wanted to run as fast as possible. He always had that fire in his eyes. It was just something he was born with.”
Mickey finally capitulated during Ryan’s junior track season, and the two began consulting with Irv Ray, a successful college coach at California Baptist University. Ray introduced long, hard tempo runs; Ryan liked them and responded well, recording his fastest track times yet. So when cross-country season began in September 2000, he continued with similar workouts.
But Hall’s season started badly. He ran several courses slower than the year before, and threw up after a poor effort in the Stanford Invitational, possibly due to a prescription med. Mickey and Irv Ray reduced the work load. Ryan protested, but relented.
Several weeks later he broke a 21-year-old record on L.A.’s fabled Mt. SAC course. He was a heavy favorite to win the West Regional on the same punishing course but almost failed to complete the distance. He wobbled to the finish in fourth, apparently dehydrated. “I came close to pulling him off the course on the last hill,” says Mickey. “He was white as a ghost. If you want to know the truth about Ryan’s senior year in cross-country, it was a disaster. There were so many ups and downs.”
Still, as he jockeyed for better position in the first mile of the Foot Locker final, Hall reminded himself that this might be his day. He knew he could run with the best, he was excited to race his first Foot Locker, and he had followed a drastic taper to ensure freshness. “I realized I might be in a downward spiral,” he says, “but I also believed I might catch a flier and win. I always challenged myself to rise to the occasion.”
Running in the Cold, Erik Heinonen settled into last place—right where he wanted to be. Heinonen, from Eugene, Oregon, had placed fifth in the West Regional race by passing dozens of runners in the last mile. He hoped for the same in the final. “I had a simple plan,” he says. “I went straight to the back. That’s where I was on the first turn when I looked over and saw another runner beside me. I remember yelling at him, ‘Hey, Dathan, what are you doing back here?’“
Webb, near the front, still hadn’t seen either Hall or Ritzenhein. This gnawed at him briefly before he changed his outlook. If Ritz wanted to monkey around, all the better for Webb. “I was expecting Ryan or Dathan to blow out the first mile,” he says. “But if they were going to dawdle, that was fine with me. I was thinking, This is great. I’m going to win this thing.”
A muscular 5’9” and 140 pounds with a toothy, gummy smile, Webb had an almost primal need to compete and win. He had begun racing in topflight D.C.-area swim leagues at age 6, starting with the sprints—”Everyone wants to be a sprinter first,” he says—before moving up to longer distances. “There’s nothing like winning,” he says. “It gives you a flutter in the gut.”
Though he set an elementary-school record in the mile run, Webb was still primarily a swimmer when he began to enter cross-country and track races in ninth grade. Right away, something was different. Better. He went from good to off-the-charts great in a flash. “Everything just clicked,” he says. “My improvement curve was exponential. I began to wonder: Special Feature: The Turning Point?”
Webb knew something about mathematical curves and data collection. His father is a World Bank economist. As Webb’s passion for running mushroomed—”I went hard core”—he began tracking everything: his miles, his times, his weight lifting. He thought he might analyze the info and detect secret pathways to success. More impressively, while still at a young age, he managed to grasp the big picture. “I remember early on that I realized if you combined a great ambition with a great work ethic, you could produce powerful results,” he says.
Webb produced like no one before him. As a sophomore, he ran the mile in 4:06.94, breaking the class record (4:07.8) Jim Ryun had set 36 years earlier. That fall, a junior at South Lakes High, Webb went undefeated in cross-country through the 1999 South Regional. Two weeks later, he flew to his first Foot Locker final convinced he could win. But he and others had underestimated another junior, Ritzenhein, who pushed to the front in the last 800 meters, as Webb faded to eighth, his rhythm disrupted by the undulations of the course.
Never lacking for confidence or combativeness, Webb couldn’t wait for the rematch. Through the summer and fall, nothing else mattered. There were local races, and States, and the South Regional, sure. But those were mere stepping stones. “I was on a personal mission,” he says. “I was so focused, so motivated. I ran workouts that just about buried me. I prepared for a battle. I was 10 times more ready than the year before.”
Webb understood that small stuff makes a difference. On easy days, he ran in a Virginia neighborhood with terrain like that of the Disney course. Before leaving home, he packed a cooked pasta meal in Tupperware. He ate it alone in his hotel room as his prerace dinner—a big improvement, he figured, over the hot dogs and hamburgers that had been served at the 1999 prerace dinner. “I was so into every detail,” he says. “I kept telling myself it was the biggest race of my life, and I had done all I possibly could to prepare for it. I thought I was ready for anything.”
On race morning, as Webb churned around the eighth tee of the Oak Trail golf course and headed to the mile mark, it seemed that his intense planning would pay off. He had staked out the perfect position near the front. He felt comfortable; he was ready to pounce. While he hadn’t seen Ritzenhein or Hall yet, that was okay. Webb was running his own race, and he was in control.
The afternoon before the Foot Locker final, Ritzenhein and his coach, Brad Prins, relaxed at a nearby movie theater, taking in the latest Austin Powers flick. “ He warned me not to laugh too much,” Ritzenhein says. “To be careful not to waste energy.” Ritz just rolled his eyes. In his five years with Prins, he had gotten used to the strange comments, weird antics, and insane workouts.
Still, Ritzenhein, slight and angular with a choirboy face, was unprepared for what Prins said afterward. “Do you know how you’re going to beat Alan Webb tomorrow?” Prins asked.
Duh, by destroying him and everyone else in the first mile like I’ve been doing all year long?
“You’re going to go out slow and take it easy the first mile,” Prins continued. “I don’t care what the pace is. But as soon as you hit the mile, you’re going to sprint and sprint and keep on sprinting until you break everyone.”
Prins was gruff and unvarnished. A 35-year Rockford High math teacher, he had started running at midlife, lost 60 pounds, and qualified for Boston with a 3:10. In his classroom, he delighted in forcing nervous students to solve problems on their feet. At cross-country practice, the torture cut deeper. In Dathan Ritzenhein, Prins found the perfect vessel. “Dathan had the drive to push himself to the edge day after day,” Prins says. “And I was mean enough to force him out onto that edge.”
The two had met when Ritz’s father, a triathlete, brought the seventh-grader to a North Kent Track Club workout run by Prins. Ritz had the usual distorted visions of athletic glory: He wanted to pitch in the bigs, or play quarterback at Notre Dame. Only problem: Ritzenhein was five feet tall, 106 pounds, and looked like a “butterball,” in his own words. Prins took one look at the waddling youngster and declared: “Nope, not going to happen.”
Over the next year, Ritzenhein sprouted six inches, put on only a few pounds, and spent all his free time bicycling, swimming, and running. He loved the midweek 20-mile time trials organized by the local bike club. “It was fun to go hard,” he says. “Going slow was boring. I liked to improve and break barriers.”
During the winter of his eighth-grade school year, the now-lean Ritzenhein threw himself into running. Every morning before school, he ran four miles as fast as he could. Pitch darkness, freezing winds, blizzards, no problem. By early spring, the runs took only 22 minutes. That summer he ran a road 5-K in 16:10. “Suddenly, people were like, ‘Who is this kid?’“ he recalls.
Realizing he had a prodigy in town, Prins read everything he could about distance running and tested each training idea on Ritz and his other runners—sprints, stadium steps, ankle weights, plyometrics, tempo runs, long runs. “We were his guinea pigs, and trained like crazy,” says Ritzenhein. “It’s amazing I never got hurt. I just kept getting stronger.” One day he ran eight miles in the morning and intervals that lasted half the afternoon. A final tally showed 32 x 400 meters in 65 seconds, with enough warmup and cooldown to give him 22 miles for the day.
Ritz took the full brunt, and he asked for more. One season he complained that he was weak on hills. “Oh, we can fix that,” Prins chortled. He began taking Ritzenhein to a local ski slope to run hill repeats. However, Prins worried that running down the steep hill might cause a leg injury. More diabolically, he wanted to reduce the recovery time between repeats. So he met Ritzenhein at the top of each repeat in his four-wheel-drive Subaru Legacy, then drove him back down in 30 seconds, complete with clouds of dust and screeching brakes.
From time to time, the team ran sprints on a big parkland loop. Prins sat in a director’s chair, blowing a whistle to start and stop each sprint. The runners never knew when they would begin, or how long they would have to maintain each full-tilt effort. Start-stop, start-stop—around and around they flew. After 15 minutes, everyone was collapsing. Even Ritzenhein, far ahead of the others. This roused Prins from his chair. “Dathan would be crawling on the ground, and I’d run over and kick him in the butt,” Prins says. “He’d look at me with this big grin, jump to his feet, and away he’d go. We pushed hard, but we had fun with it.”
Ritzenhein admits as much. It helped that he was winning everything in sight. “I got so much satisfaction getting better,” he says. “The longer the distance, the better I did. Others might beat me in speed workouts, but I could kill them in tempos and longer runs. It never bothered me to redline it forever.”
“Dathan came to realize he had a special talent, and he refused to just go through the motions,” Prins says. “He didn’t squander anything. He always tried to be the best he could be.”
In the summer and fall of 2000, Ritzenhein trained harder than ever before. He hit 100-mile weeks on occasion, and he held steady around 80 miles a week during the season. He trained through his races and still won by wide margins, often breaking his own course records. “Senior year was a frenzy,” he says. “I knew it was my last high-school cross-country season, and I knew what was coming at Foot Locker. The tension just kept building. The last couple of weeks, it was almost boiling over.”
That’s when Prins cut Ritzenhein’s mileage at last and turned up the speed. The week before the Foot Locker final, Bloom called Ritzenhein for an update. His most-recent workout: 9 x 400 meters, with the first three 400s in 66 seconds, the next three in 62, and the last three in 58, 57 and 55. The skinny kid was already an aerobic fiend. Now he was honing his turnover.
Ritzenhein and his coach, Brad Prins, relaxed at a nearby movie theater, taking in the latest, Ritzenhein rolled out of bed at 4 a.m. for his usual race-day “shake out” run. Nothing special—just a two-mile jog and a handful of strides to break up the cobwebs. On this particular morning, he needed it. “I was supernervous,” he says. “I used the time to get some focus before the madness.”
Amazingly, Ritzenhein recalls almost nothing of the first mile. “I know it sounds strange,” he says, “but all I remember is that it felt so bizarre to have other runners around me. There hadn’t been anyone near me in a race for a long time.”
Just before the 32 runners swarmed past the mile mark, Ritzenhein moved up on the outside of the course and grabbed a slight lead, pulling ahead of Webb. He saw the mile clock just ahead: 4:42, 4:43, 4:44 ... A noisy crowd of friends, family, media, and cross-country fans had collected at the mile, anticipating fireworks. “There was a pulsating energy all along the course,” says Bloom. “Everyone was expecting something special.”
4:45, 4:46 ... When Ritzenhein scooted past the mile clock, he saw the pixels blink 4:47. Then he broke into a dead sprint. He stretched out his wiry legs, pumped his birdlike arms, and sucked air into his thin-but-capacious lungs. “Basically, I just laid all my cards on the table,” he says. “I think maybe the slow first mile threw the guys for a loop, but it was now-or-never time.”
Webb, alone in second, was ready. He was expecting this. He was right where he wanted to be. Only one hitch: “I figured no one could run away from me, but the move Dathan made was really huge,” Webb says. “He got a few meters right away, so I decided to creep back to him little by little.” That’s the textbook response, of course. An explosive runner like Webb could quickly close the gap, but that would be a bonehead move. Webb was smart. With two miles yet to run, he chose to bide his time.
In a matter of seconds, Ritz led Webb by 10 meters. Everyone else had disappeared from view, or so it seemed. Distance races are often called “races of attrition.” Few change character so quickly, so completely. This one did. There was no attrition. Ritzenhein simply laid waste to the whole field.
In the second mile, Ritzenhein was in full steamroller mode. He noticed that the course was spongier and bumpier than the previous year, the weather more draining. Excellent. The tougher the conditions, the better his chances. Mainly, he focused on his objective: push, push, push. “There’s a lot of pressure when you commit and go to the front,” he says. “Suddenly you become the hunted, and everyone’s got you in their sights. I had to make sure Alan never got back on me.”
Webb kept waiting for the gap to shrink. He was running allout, yet got no reward for his effort. Over one hillock and down the next, up one fairway and around the green, he couldn’t make a dent on Ritz’s lead. It held constant at 10 meters. “It took everything I had just to stay close,” he says. “I was so surprised. I expected my breathing to calm down, but I just couldn’t get it back. I began to realize, Oh my God, it’s not happening.”
Ritzenhein covered the second mile in 4:37, 10 seconds faster than the first. He had no idea where Webb and Hall were. The crowds were screaming so loud, so close, that he couldn’t decipher any clear message. He resisted looking back. This was no time to give a rival hope. “I was running out of steam,” he says. “Pushing to the limit. I knew I’d have nothing left at the end.”
Hall had yet to manage a big move. Through much of the twisty second mile, he couldn’t even see Ritzenhein and Webb, who had surged far ahead. He focused on staying in front of the West runners who had beaten him at regionals. “I missed the critical moment when Dathan and Alan took off, and then they were gone,” he says. “I thought they might blow up and come back, but mainly I worked to fend off the other West runners.”
The strategy paid off. Soon he was in third place, gaining on Webb. The celebrated trio had raced to the first three positions, although Ritz held what looked like an insurmountable lead.
In the last mile, Webb almost cracked. He felt more observer than participant, as if he were watching a video that violated the laws of his known universe. With every stride, the skin-and-bones runner ahead of him was increasing his lead. “I’d never been broken so far from the finish,” Webb says. “I couldn’t believe what was happening.” When he realized Hall was closing near the three-mile mark, Webb mustered a kick to maintain his position. He finished second in 14:55, Hall third in 14:59.
Ritzenhein never let up. He thrashed his way through the third mile to the biggest lead in the history of the Foot Locker boys final. He broke the tape in 14:35, a full 20 seconds ahead of Webb, having utterly demolished the entire field. All across the land, young running fans logged onto Dyestat.com and declared Ritzenhein the untouchable king of high-school distance runners. In three years of Foot Locker competition, he had finished eighth (sophomore year), first, and first.
Disgusted with his third-place finish, Hall brushed past his parents and hurried back to his hotel. There he saw and congratulated the girls race winner, Sara Bei, who would, five years later, become his wife. Then he went out for a run. “I was really upset,” he says. “I had some things I just had to get out of me, so I went and ran as hard as I could for 45 minutes.”
A stunned Webb sought solace from his parents. “They were good,” he says. “They didn’t sugarcoat it; they knew how disappointed I was.” Moments later, searching for a silver lining, he looked ahead. “I had built up such a great base of fitness in crosscountry, I figured it would pay dividends,” he says. “With some good speed workouts, I thought the track times would come.”
Ritzenhein staggered through the chute and collapsed to the grass—a signature move. He was soon surrounded by wellwishers: his parents; Rockford teammate Kalin Toedebusch, who had just finished sixth in the girls race (and who would later become his wife); and Brad Prins. Even as the turf cushioned Ritzenhein’s spent body, he couldn’t shake the agonies just endured. “I was hurting so bad the last two miles,” he says. “I kept going by telling myself, You only have to hurt another 10 minutes. If you don’t keep pushing, you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”
Ritz had won with grit, sweat, resolve. He won with talent and guts. He won because he understood that victory doesn’t come cheap, and he was willing to pay the price. “It was my last high-school cross-country race,” he says. “My last Foot Locker. It was so important. It seemed like the biggest thing in the world.”
