Always somewhere to go: Dathan Ritzenhein and the OAC

Words by Devin Kelly. Photography by Colin Wong.

“We’ll figure it out.”

That’s what Dathan Ritzenhein said to George Beamish in 2020 as he drove him through the high plains of Colorado to the airport. Beamish was about to leave his new team and his new coach for months. He was heading home to New Zealand to get a U.S. Visa as Covid lockdown loomed, dealing with a mess of injuries that Ritzenhein would later describe to me as, essentially, “two broken legs.” The Rocky Mountains serrated the distant skyline, and hope – of a promising running future and professional success – was running on something close to empty.

And they did figure it out. It took a personalized training plan that included multiple days off per week, input from a strength coach and therapist, Jason Ross, and an emphatically supportive team of young runners. Nearly four years later, Beamish unleashed a vicious kick and outsprinted some of the best in the world to win gold in the 1,500m at the World Indoor Championships in Glasgow. He also represented New Zealand at the 2024 summer Olympics in Paris.

Some coaches might not connect those two moments and tie them into one story. For many people, four years is a long time. But for Dathan Ritzenhein – the head coach of the On Athletics Club – four years is all part of the process. For a coach whose guiding philosophy is that you “always have to have somewhere to go,” someone like Beamish represents one of Ritzenhein’s central tenets: “You can’t do the short fix; you have to do the long fix.” According to Ritzenhein, someone like Beamish had – and still has – “all the talent in the world,” but such talent had to be developed “over the course of years.” The story that ended with Beamish’s victory lap around the indoor track in Glasgow – flag above his head, and a smile across his face – had to include the conversation inside a Ritzenhein’s car outside the airport in Colorado. An athlete is not just their results; they are the thousand ordinary and extraordinary and seen and unseen moments that make up their daily lives. 

“The foundation for everything,” Ritzenhein told me while spending time with a group of athletes training in San Moritz, “is consistent work, over and over again.” It’s no surprise that, in 2024, four years after On Athletics Club was formed, Ritzenhein is in the midst of a summer filled with some of the most prestigious and high-pressure track meets on the global stage, coaching a team of eight Olympians, representing over a half dozen countries. This is no accident, and much of this success can be traced back to Ritzenhein’s philosophy and commitment as a coach.

This success has made this year, according to Ritzenhein, the “hardest year” for the OAC, as many of the team’s athletes are doing so well on the world stage that they are “on their own track.” And for Ritzenhein, someone with so much desire for involvement in the work and lives of his athletes, this has made him “want to be everywhere.” An impossible task. In April this year, while supporting Morgan McDonald and Ollie Hoare at the Australian National Championships, Ritzenhein had to settle for watching Hellen Obiri winning the Marathon in Boston on his phone while sitting on a plane. He must have looked, he admitted to me, absolutely “out of his mind” – eyes affixed on the small screen, his face a bundle of nerves. He was a coach trying to communicate his care from thousands of miles away.

It was a workout, not a race, that made me interested in Ritzenhein’s approach as a coach. In a filmed workout posted on YouTube in January 2023, six of OAC’s athletes break four minutes in the 1600 while running on an indoor track at altitude in Boulder, Colorado. It’s a stunning scene, as all six athletes — Beamish, Joe Klecker, Olli Hoare, Yared Nuguse, Mario Garcia Romo, and Jonas Raess — run with these loping, long strides, relaxed and together. But it is Ritzenhein that, to me, steals the show. On the infield, in the heart of the camera’s focus, Ritzenhein jogs at some near-blistering pace from one side of the track to the other, calling out splits, offering encouragement. And what struck me from the very first time I watched this — and what still strikes me now — is that Ritzenhein never raises his voice. He offers a slew of positive comments. He is entirely at ease as his athletes are tearing up the track. The only words he basically says are good and great. He says them over and over again. It’s a powerful display of support in a world that so often associates positions of power with toxicity. 

When I asked Ritzenhein about that workout, he told me that sometimes, in the same workout, “you get one athlete who is struggling and one who is doing great,” so the most important thing is to be a “stabilizing presence.” It explained his ease, his coolness, his gentle positivity while his athletes were running terrific circles around him, each of them caught up in the midst of doing something amazing. If he got too excited, he might over encourage one athlete and stress out another who was on the limit. Better to give space for all of his athletes to find themselves. They are, after all, some of the most driven athletes in the world. Ritzenhein is the first to admit that they will always be able to push themselves, so his role has less to do with motivation and more to do with support. It’s about being someone who can help with all that comes with that motivation — the success, the failure, the anxiety, the burnout, the stress, and the desire. In an interview with Beamish from 2022, Beamish refers to Ritzenhein as someone who is “super in tune with what an athlete needs” and “very empathetic.”

The psychotherapist Carl Rogers popularized a term in his therapeutic practice — Unconditional Positive Regard. It is a belief, really, in supporting and accepting people for who they are, without negative judgment. The idea is simple: you want to create space for people to express their fullest selves so that they feel safe enough to grow, change, and explore who they are. It’s about both trust and belief. You have to create a space of belief in a person – and not just part of a person, but the full extent of a person, the beauty and the baggage – so that they trust you enough to grow in your presence. Such a practice of empathy and deep understanding feels vital to Ritzenhein’s practice as a coach; he sees his athletes not just as athletes, but as people, people with feelings and motivations, people who will inevitably go through various cycles of success and failure and everything in between. Ritzenhein (alongside Assistant OAC Coach, Kelsey Quinn) understands that his athletes are not just finalists and gold medal contenders; they are also, at the same time, people in need of reassurance while on a drive to the airport, and people in need of a stable presence while they are lighting up the track in the middle of a workout. 

When he took the job as the OAC’s first coach, On didn’t yet have a track spike to offer them. And Ritzenhein had just retired from a sixteen year professional career, with no real coaching credits to his name. In such a situation, Ritzenhein centered – and still centers – humility. When we spoke, he told me how important the phrase “I don’t know” is to his practice as a coach. “If I don’t know,” he said, “I’ve got to find someone to help.” 

His athletes at the time were in the same boat. Young, just out of college, they were taking a massive professional risk to join the team. And so they took this risk together. Some of the original OAC athletes, like Joe Klecker, even interviewed Ritzenhein as part of his hiring process, a process that included Ritzenhein flying out to Boulder to ride his bike alongside Klecker during a 20-mile (32-km) run. As a coach who was learning his way met athletes who were finding theirs, a real bond was formed. Ritzenhein became not just a coach, but nearly everything to some of these athletes. “I made all the decisions for them like you would an incoming freshman for a college team,” Ritzenhein told me. He was all they knew about professional running. He had to “help them grow up and grow into the sport.” As such, there’s a real intimacy to the connection between Ritzenhein and his athletes. Now, years later, Ritzenhein told me: “I think I’ve cried with every one of my athletes.”

As Ritzenhein spoke, I thought about a job I took a couple of years ago, a job I still have – the co-coach of my high school’s first-ever track team. For all of my athletes, their time on our team is their first exposure to organized track, each race one of the first races they’ve run in their lives. As coaches, we have to walk the line between grace and motivation, between pressure and relaxation, urgency and levity. We have to teach our athletes how to love something and get better at the same time, how to navigate this new sport through all the various successes and failures – many of which are so wildly unfamiliar to them. When I listened to Ritzenhein talk, I thought about how, even though we often speak about the manyfold differences between professionals and amateurs, one key philosophy for success – however you define it – has to involve knowing yourself as a whole person, not just as one fixed thing. 

For a sport that is so personal, a coach has to see their athletes as whole people, not merely as results on a scoreboard above a track somewhere. That level of personal care is part of why this summer is so meaningful to Ritzenhein. It is just one marker of a long process that he hopes to continue for decades. And though we live in a culture that is hooked on what is immediately gratifying, Ritzenhein knows that all of this — the results, the workouts, the ups, the downs — is part of a much longer game than many of us are willing to admit. It’s why he will be there for each of his athletes, beside the track and alongside them for a run and in the driver’s seat of the car, reminding them again and again — no matter the result — that there is time, that they will figure it out, and that there will always be somewhere to go.