Rockford High (Rockford, Mich.) cross country star Dathan Ritzenhein, a 5-foot-7, 122-pound senior, has been training for another stellar year in cross country and track, running nearly 90 miles per week this summer.

He returns as the defending state cross country champion, the Midwest Regional cross country champion (he set a course record at the University of Wisconsin with a time of 14:55, nine seconds faster than the previous mark) and the Foot Locker National cross country champion, having won the 3.1-mile race in 14:29 last December.

	Ritzenhein is a champion.

Ritzenhein also won the National Nike Indoor two-mile championship back in March with a time of 8:52, and set a record in the 3,200-meter event with a time of 8:41.1 at the Roosevelt Relays in May. To cap a stellar junior season, he captured the 2-mile title at the Foot Locker National Outdoor Track & Field Championships on June 16 with a time of 8:48.

Ritzenhein, who is coached by Mark Nesser and Brad Prins (Rockford's distance coach, who also coaches the teen year-round at the North Kent running club), is being recruited by numerous schools. He says Michigan, Oregon and Colorado are his top three choices, to date.

But the nation's top harrier isn't thinking about collegiate success quite yet. He still has his senior season to think about, and says Rockford's success is paramount on his mind.

"We always run as a team all summer long," says Ritzenhein, who then describes a route that includes a 7½-mile trail loop. "We'll do the trail together and then I'll do a couple more miles."

When he's asked what he's running for individually, Ritzenhein isn't shy.

"I definitely want to win Foot Locker again and state," he says. "And I want the team to win state again. We took second the last three years in a row."

Prins says the Rockford boys' team, as a whole, looks strong this year, but will likely go head-to-head with Novi High (Novi, Mich.), which has ousted Rockford two years in a row. As for Ritzenhein, the coach says there aren't many high school runners out there in the same class.

"Based upon the workouts he's done all summer and the success last year, and barring all sicknesses and injuries, he should be unbeaten this year," says Prins. "He should repeat as state champion, regional champion and national Foot Locker champion."

If he grabs the state and national crowns again, Ritzenhein will have completed his career at Rockford with five state and six national titles between cross country and track.

Last spring, after the teen won the 3,200-meter event at the state championships, Sterling Heights Stevenson High coach Kevin Hanson approached Ritzenhein with a serious proposition.

"He wanted to know if Dathan wanted to run in the Olympic trial qualifier, a 5K race," says Prins. "I was surprised [Dathan] said 'Yeah.' He wanted to see if he could compete against collegiate and post-collegiate runners. It was improbable, though (that he would make it), because the longest race in track is the 2-mile and he had not been training to run 3.1 miles. But the way Dathan is, he said, 'Fine. Sounds like fun.' He ran it in 14:13, the fastest time ever run by a Michigan high schooler."

While Ritzenhein didn't qualify for the Olympic trials in the 5K , the needed mark was 13:48 , he did snap a longstanding scholastic record, previously set at 14:34 by Brian Grosso of Walled Lake Western High in 1989 at the USA Junior Olympic Championships. The experience also gave the rocket from Rockford a taste of things to come.

"[The Olympics] is definitely a longtime goal. I hadn't been training enough for it," says Ritzenhein. "I think I could have gotten a lot closer had it been the right conditions, but I didn't want to train through the summer either, because I wanted to have a good cross country season."