was Dathan Ritzenheim the best HS 5k runner of the modern era?

German Fernandez was the best high school distance runner. 14:24 Woodward Park. 4:01 mile, 2 hour later 8:35 3200. All by himself. Pre super shoes. Hurt his foot for footlocker unfortunately.

HELL NO

Verzbicas never ran faster than he needed to in cross, and when he did his best on the track he set the the two mile record at Pre. Verzbicas also had more speed than Ritz. German vs Verzbicas would have been great.

Define modern era? Guys whose names you know? Because I still think I might go with Bill McChesney.

Easily. 13:44 in regular spikes instead of super shoes. I wish he took a crack at the 10k record. It's crazy he ran 13:44 in like 2001. Kids are still catching up to this even with all the performance and training upgrades. Lindgren was very impressive as well.

The thread is about the best 5k runner. German and Lukas were better at other distances.

Lindgren>Ritz>Lex>Rupp>Conner

Leo would have been better than all of them if he'd ran a 5k.

5k cross country, yes. There are many guys who can contend on the track. Virgin, Rupp, Lindgren. I believe Ritz had the largest margin of victory at Foot Locker? Plus he easily beat Hall and Webb senior year. Third at world junior cross. Yes, I realize there’s actually an American who won world junior cross, but that’s when it was way less competitive with practically none of Africa competing?

In Ritz's defense, he had to race Bekele and a likely age cheat who ran 28:12. Pretty impressive what he did.

No.

I think Distance running is way up across the board in the US. The new technology helps in training more so than one random race. Those who take advantage of the technology over time and train consistently run fast. at that moment the new shoe technology does help.

Pretty strange that Leo stayed stuck on running the 1500 his senior year. Very strange choice on his part to never run a 3200/2 miles or 5k his senior year.

Ritz is awesome but I don’t think he was the best.

Letsrun doesn’t give the new guys the credit they deserve. Yes the shoe technology got better but highschool XC is the most competitive it’s ever been. These guys do have the shoe advantage but they are also training harder and smarter than ever, and fighting off far more competitive fields.

A 15:00-17:00 minute team spread even 5-6 years ago was a very good team, and now it’s just average. Most of these kids can’t afford dragonflies either. Teams that haven’t adopted the new competitive spirit that has emerged in the last few years have gone from state competitors to non qualifiers.

The credit I give Ritz is that he was an extremely rare type of athlete for his time. A very athletically gifted kid when many of those kids would choose different sports back then, with a killer work ethic and very smart yet gutsy racing. That package was very rare back then, now XC draws a lot more talent and we see kids as good as him a lot more regularly.

Ritz is easily the best HS XC runner of the past 30+ years. No one since would beat him on any type of course more than maybe 1 time in 10.

Does that make him the best 5K runner? I don't know, the times of the past few years and kids being able to endless travel to wherever they want for a race now makes it harder to compare to Dathan's track exploits.

Ritz was also restrained by silly MHSAA rules. He wasn't able to travel as often to the big meets to race high level 3200s.

I don't know what Hobbs Kessler ran for 5k but he hit 3:32 I think in high school

Lindgren was like 9 secs off the world record, Leo’s great but he ain’t beating that

Was he actually? Thats ducking insane

You're welcome.