If on Sunday, November 7th, you watch the New York City Marathon, chances are that one of the first things you’ll see is a pack of emaciated-looking men hurtling down the street at a little over twelve miles an hour, or about four minutes and fifty-five seconds a mile. To the onlooker, they will be an incomprehensible blur: a stampede of sharp-elbowed, highly focussed gazelles, so economical in their motion that they hardly seem to be touching the ground at all.

Salazar overhauled the marathoner Dathan Ritzenhein’s stride. Illustration by Daniel Hertzberg

Somewhere in the middle of this pack will be a slight, pale runner from Michigan whose race bib reads “Ritz.” As the underdog, Ritz—whose full name is Dathan Ritzenhein—will attract less attention than the race favorites: Meb Keflezighi, who last year became the first American to win the race in a quarter century, and Haile Gebrselassie, an Ethiopian marathon legend and the world record holder in the event. This is fine with Ritzenhein, whose New York “début,” as marathoners say, came in 2006, when he was twenty-three years old and so hot a prospect that, according to Running Times, race organizers paid him about two hundred thousand dollars. (Ritzenhein’s agent disputes this figure.) A National Collegiate Champion in cross country, Ritzenhein arrived in New York amid predictions that he would be the next great American marathoner. For the first twenty miles, he seemed primed to fulfill that promise, staying on the heels of the leaders. But, as the race entered the Bronx, he started to lag. By the time the runners reached the homestretch, in Central Park, Ritzenhein was practically crawling. He finished eleventh.

Afterward, Ritzenhein blamed his inexperience for the disappointing performance. Over the next three years, however, little changed. In the 2008 Olympic marathon, Ritzenhein finished ninth, plagued by calf pains that forced him to stop mid-race to stretch. The following April, he finished in eleventh place in London, with a time, 2:10, that put him almost five minutes behind the winner. “London was really the last straw,” he said recently. “I thought, I’ve put so much into this. Do I really want to be just mediocre?”

Two months later, Ritzenhein left his coach of five years, Brad Hudson, to join a group of runners coached by Alberto Salazar, an enigmatic ex-racer regarded by many as the best American marathoner ever. For the past eight years, Salazar has been paid by Nike to lead a group of up to a dozen runners, who train together on the campus of the company, in Beaverton, Oregon—and who, Nike hopes, will win races wearing swoosh-adorned clothing. At first, Salazar had limited success. But in recent years he has acquired a certain mystique for his ability to cajole fragile runners into peak performance. Salazar has been widely credited with resuscitating the career of Alan Webb, a twenty-seven-year-old prodigy miler, and with guiding the ascent of two female American record holders, Kara Goucher and Amy Yoder Begley.

For Ritzenhein, initiation into Salazar’s group proceeded roughly. As a coach, Salazar had become obsessed with optimizing his runners’ form, and Ritzenhein did not escape that scrutiny. During the athletes’ regular track workouts, Salazar criticized both the cant of Ritzenhein’s pelvis and his nearly horizontal forearm carriage, which he argued was wasting energy. He also criticized him for his tendency to run with his thumbs pointing up, rather than curled over in a fist. (According to Salazar, this strained the forearm, and thus, through a long chain of physiological connections, the leg muscles.) Though the objections puzzled Ritzenhein, he didn’t question them. “Alberto told me, ‘It’s imperative that you believe completely in what we’re going to do,’ ” he recalled, “ ‘because it will be completely different from anything you’ve been taught.’ ”

Salazar’s tinkering was controversial. Among élite coaches and competitors, tampering with an athlete’s natural running style is recognized as a risky enterprise. Many top distance runners have idiosyncratic form, and adjusting even a minor detail of a racer’s alignment can trigger a cascade of changes: subtle shifts in knee or foot position that can make the runner vulnerable to injury. This was particularly true for Ritzenhein, who was prone to developing stress fractures in the metatarsal bones of his feet. “When you run a hundred miles a week, your body finds natural positions that work,” the élite Australian runner Craig Mottram points out. “It’s flirting with disaster to mess with that.”

After three months of training with Salazar, however, Ritzenhein went on a tear. At a five-thousand-metre race in Zurich that summer, he set a new American record. Six weeks later, he travelled to Birmingham, England, for the World Half-Marathon Championships, where he blew through the 13.1-mile course in sixty minutes, finishing in third place.

The performances spurred Salazar to attempt an even more radical overhaul of Ritzenhein’s stride the following fall. “I told Dathan, ‘To compete against the best, you’ve got to fix this,’ ” Salazar said in September. “ ‘But there’s a risk. We may injure you.’ Dathan said, ‘I’m willing to take that risk.’ And so we started changing his form.”

When Salazar began running competitively, in the late seventies, he was known as a “sitter”: he kept his hips so low that at times it looked as if he were straddling a desk chair. At six feet one, Salazar was also tall for a distance runner, with a gangly stride that initially led some competitors to discount him. Kirk Pfrangle, a racer with the Greater Boston Track Club, who first observed Salazar at a high-school track meet, recalls being baffled by his awkward mechanics. “It was like all the body parts were working in opposition to each other,” Pfrangle remembered. “And yet he was running incredibly fast.”

Pfrangle introduced himself after the meet, and invited Salazar to join the Track Club’s workouts. It was an unusual gesture. Salazar, who was born in Cuba and grew up in a suburb of Boston, was a promising teen-ager. But the Track Club was a bastion of élite runners, including the four-time Boston Marathon winner Bill Rodgers. Despite this, Salazar seemed unintimidated, often pushing himself painfully through the club’s workouts. “He was definitely Mr. Persistence,” Rodgers recalled.

After high school, Salazar enrolled at the University of Oregon and joined its cross-country and track teams, both of which were top-ranked. Salazar had always been competitive, and at Oregon he began exploring tools for enhancing performance, including an unwieldy scuba-type mouthpiece that used chemical crystals to absorb oxygen, supposedly mimicking the effects of training at altitude. To help his muscles recover from workouts, Salazar experimented with dimethyl sulfoxide, a lotion that horse trainers use to reduce inflammation in thoroughbred racehorses. A runner who knew Salazar at the time recalls that the lotion was absorbed quickly through the pores of the skin and then entered the bloodstream. “You’d rub it on, and then you’d get this real garlicky taste in your mouth,” he explained. “That’s how you knew it was working.” Eccentric as the technologies were, Salazar was meticulous in evaluating them: constantly monitoring the effect on his performance.

In college, Salazar did well but not spectacularly. In 1978, as a sophomore, he finished sixth in the ten-thousand-metre race at the N.C.A.A. Championships. Later that summer, Salazar, after struggling to keep pace with Rodgers, collapsed with heatstroke when he crossed the finish line at the Falmouth Road Race, in Cape Cod. He likely survived only because the race doctor had him lie in a plastic kiddie pool filled with ice water.

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Though Salazar finished tenth, he nevertheless believed that he had passed a mental milestone. “After that race, I really felt, All right. I’m getting tough now,” he recalled. He intensified his training and, not long afterward, announced that he was going to prepare for the 1980 Olympics, in Moscow, by working out at altitude in Kenya’s Rift Valley.

Salazar got a room at a hunting lodge near Thomson’s Falls, not far from where an élite Kenyan team trained, but he spent much of his time running alone, pushing himself on remote, exhausting runs through the countryside. Rudy Chapa, who had been Salazar’s teammate at Oregon, remembers the trip as isolating. “He was living in this hotel by himself, with no one to talk to,” Chapa said. “He would just lie there and read the same newspaper article over and over again.” When the U.S. announced plans to boycott the Olympics, Salazar returned to the University of Oregon. Rather than slow down, though, he redoubled his training. During a layover at LaGuardia Airport, on the way home, he did an eleven-mile run around Queens. Examining his running logs for the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, he calculated that he took off an average of less than one day a year.

Salazar’s effort transformed him from a respectable collegiate racer into one of the best in the country. He won the first marathon he entered, in New York City in 1980. The next year, he won New York again, finishing in 2:08:13 and setting a new course record. The following spring, he outsprinted Dick Beardsley by two seconds in the Boston Marathon—a gruelling victory that came to be known as “the Duel in the Sun.” Racing Beardsley up Commonwealth Avenue in a fog of motorcycle exhaust, Salazar, toweringly rangy in red shorts and a white singlet, looked at once indomitable and haggard. For most of the race, he had drunk no water, worrying that the extra weight would slow him down, and his face was crusted with the white salt of crystallized sweat. After the finish line, he collapsed again, as he had at Falmouth. This time, his core temperature fell to eighty-eight degrees. To revive him, paramedics had to administer six quarts of intravenous saline.

Though Salazar went on to win the New York City Marathon a third time, in 1982, he soon began to struggle. He lost a marathon for the first time in the spring of 1983, in Rotterdam, after pulling a muscle in his groin. The following year, he developed patellar tendinitis in his knee and then a torn hamstring. From there, his performance plummeted. After qualifying for the 1984 Olympic marathon, in Los Angeles, Salazar spent weeks training in Houston, in an effort to mimic the heat of L.A., only to finish fifteenth. His Olympic teammate Pete Pfitzinger speculates that the training in Houston left Salazar exhausted. “If he’d been satisfied to be fifth in L.A., he could have trained moderately and gotten it,” Pfitzinger says. “But Alberto never wanted to be fifth in anything.”

At home in Eugene after the Olympics, Salazar began to feel increasingly sluggish. Fighting to restore his speed, he invested in a series of elaborate medical tools, including an ultrasound machine to ease his tendinitis and a coffinlike hyperbaric chamber that he believed would saturate his muscles with oxygen. He also relied on a Finnish masseur, who sometimes lived in an apartment above the garage. None of these strategies worked, and for the next decade Salazar all but abandoned running. He invested in and managed a restaurant in Eugene, then sold his share to take a job in the sports-marketing department at Nike, which had sponsored him during his racing days. Though marathoners often run fastest in their early thirties, Salazar’s collapse was early and abrupt. He had peaked at twenty-four and was finished at twenty-six.