'So, so impressive' - Teenage running prodigy Sam Ruthe sets course for athletics stardom

Sitting in an airport departure lounge, Nick Willis is marvelling - and chuckling - at New Zealand's latest middle-distance running sensation.

In the space of seven days, 15-year-old Sam Ruthe clocked 4m 01.72s over a mile, 1m 50.57s for 800 metres and 7m 56.18s for 3000 metres.

The latter performance was the fastest for his age in the world, as he also became this country's youngest-ever senior men's national champion, surpassing the feats of triple jumper Dave Norris, who was two years older when he won the first of his 28 titles in 1957.

At the same age, Willis - a two-time Olympic medallist and former Commonwealth Games 1500-metre champion - would have been left well down the track.

"My personal best was 4m 10s for 1500 [metres]," he recalls.

"I think I ran 4m 09 in the very last race of the season.

"For 3km, if you double that, it would be 8m 18. He just ran 20 seconds faster than my 1500 [metres] pace for double the distance. His last 800m of that race was faster than my 800m PB (personal best), which was 1m 59.8s.

"He'd be whipping my butt big time… so, so impressive."

Although Sam Ruthe is a relatively new arrival on the running scene, his family name is well known to Willis.

Father Ben Ruthe was a local Wellington legend during his junior years, breaking national records over 800 metres and 1000 metres. These days, at age 44, he's become legendary for pacing his son through the first kilometre of his first national title.

"We all looked up to him, then we became competitors and friends, and lo and behold, now his son is coming along and Ben is pacing these races," laughs Willis.

"I'm a father myself, so I'm really enjoying tracking this now through that lens."

Sam's parents - Ben and Jess Ruthe - have amassed a multitude of national championships between them, covering track, cross-country, road and half marathon.

As a junior, Ben finished fourth in the world mountain running championships and later came within a blink of breaking four minutes for the mile.

"Ben had amazingly lofty goals in his career," recalls Willis. "He was more ambitious than I was and now he has a son that actually has the potential to fulfil some of those goals.

"I remember Ben wanting to be the first person in history to break 100 seconds for 800 metres - that's two sub-50 second laps - which would be a world record still."

That pedigree is even more impressive another generation back, when Timaru-born grandmother Rosemary Wright moved to England as a teenager, winning Commonwealth Games 800-metre gold for Scotland at Edinburgh in 1970 and a European 4x400m relay crown with Great Britain.

Granny is still faster than Sam over 400 metres.

Grandfather Trevor Wright ran a world record debut marathon, won European silver, reached the podium at both New York and London, and claimed the NZ title in 1982.

While Rosemary Wright competed at the Kingston Commonwealth Games as a 16-year-old, her hubby was 37, when he recorded his fastest marathon (2h 12m 29s), after changing allegiance to New Zealand.

With that much running success in the family, Sam Ruthe's achievements probably shouldn't surprise anyone - yet they do.

"This is outside the realms of being fathomable," said Ben Ruthe.

"I wouldn't have thought it was actually possible for a Kiwi kid in New Zealand to win the senior men's champs.

"This race was up there with the best 3000-metre championships in history - the first four all broke eight minutes and seven of the top 10 all ran PBs. One of those runners just behind him [fifth-placed Toby Gualter] had won the NZ 10,000-metre champs only four weeks earlier.

"That's hard to get your head around. He's supposed to be rocking up, as a Year 11, to the NZ secondary schools cross-country, but the thought of the NZ senior men's champion racing school kids… it's hard to fathom."

Ben admits he submitted a 20-year-old personal best to gain entry to the 3000-metre championship field and his son repaid the favour by running 11 seconds faster than his dad ever did.

"I was so lucky to be able to do that," said Ben. "I was a bit nervous about whether I could run just under 2:40 for a kilometre or not because that's ticking along at a reasonable clip for a 45-year-old man.

"I was a bit slow out of the blocks and my wife was screaming at me, because after 10 metres, I was behind two people, and I panicked and had to elbow my way through to get to the front."

On Sunday, Ruthe junior will attempt a 1500-metre age group mark held by two-time Olympic champion Jakob Ingebrigtsen.

Then, before his next birthday, he hopes to become the youngest athlete to run a four-minute mile, also achieved by the Norwegian, when he was 16.

"There's actually a trend in the last five years of these super-young athletes being competitive on the adult level, so it almost wasn't a shock to hear what Sam was doing, because it's not uncommon," said Willis.

"There's a young Australian Cam Meyers, who is 18, but when he was 16, he was running incredibly fast times as well, and a guy from the Netherlands, Neils Laros, just got sixth in the Olympic 1500-metre final, as an 18-year-old.

"You almost need to be doing this, if you want to be at world level now. Don't wait until your mid-to-late 20s, strike while the iron is hot… but 15 is completely different to 16 or 17.

"I saw the times and thought they were incredible, amazing, maybe he was an early developer that was able to cope with the training that adults undertake. Then I found out how little he's been training and thought, 'Wow, that really is incredible'.

Ruthe is coached by former marathoner Craig Kirkwood, who has enjoyed success guiding the careers of triathlete Hayden Wilde and middle distance exponent Sam Tanner - the second-fastest Kiwi ever over 1500 metres and the mile behind Willis and John Walker respectively.

Such talent is a precious commodity and, so far, he has seemingly excelled on a modest training diet comparable with any regular teenage boy, but what happens next may ultimately decide how far he goes in his sport.

"Sam hasn't even tapped into the real training that he's capable of," said Willis. "That's the most exciting thing.

"There's a new training method out there. In the past, hard training carried the risk of breaking down, but training theory has taken leaps and bounds in the last five years, led by Ingebrigtsen and what they call the 'Norwegian Method'.

"There's a real understanding now of working an in-between training zone, where you're growing your aerobic capacity without stressing the body with hard, lactate, stressful anaerobic workouts that have burnt people out in the past.

"It's a very sustainable method of coaching, really similar to what triathletes and cyclists and swimmers have always known, and now running has been able to figure out a way to do it as well. You develop your internal engine system without the risk of breaking down your skeletal system.

"I don't have any trepidation or fear, only excitement."

As he enters the fifth form at Tauranga Boys College, Ruthe is now confronted with off-track pressures that can derail adults, let alone precocious teenagers.

As social media interest swells, so too do the expectations of potential sponsors and meet organisers scrambling for a piece of the action.

"Over the past week, I've been approached by global sporting brands that want to partner with him," said Ben Ruthe. "It's a little hard to get my head around.

"In US high schools, track and field is such a big sport, and you can get scholarships to universities worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Getting on ranking lists is key and what was phenomenal about his race on Saturday was his time was quicker than any American high school runner of any age in history.

"Sam would be the equivalent of a freshman in his first year at high school, with four years still ahead of him."

Both sponsored athletes in their prime, the Ruthes have been able to build a support network around their son, so he can continue to lead a relatively normal teenage life.

His physical care falls to physiotherapist Leanna Veal, Ben handles the commercial side through his financial consultancy, Jess makes home a "safe place" in terms of rest and diet, and Kirkwood oversees his training.

"In terms of his diet, he just likes eating healthy food," said Ben. "He'll happily have lollies and burgers, but he really enjoys good healthy meals.

"He takes himself off to bed early, because he knows that you improve, not from the training, but the recovery from training. That's not normal for a teenager."

Sam Ruthe has done very little media, which is why Ben is handling this interview.

"I've done a few radio interviews and had the opportunity to listen to them with him, and talk about how I responded, what I could have done differently and what I could have done better, so he can learn from that," said Ben.

Another by-product of his first senior national title was his first drug test.

"As a 15-year-old, he's already been accused of taking drugs, which is crazy," said Ben.

"It's quite nice that he's been tested so young, but how do you handle things like that?"

Mapping out an appropriate career path will inevitably lead to some hard decisions, like where Sam goes once he leaves school.

For most teenagers, securing a US college scholarship offers a ticket to the big time, but many have struggled with the pressure so far away from home.

"The key is getting these kids into really supportive, professional programmes that nurture and look after them," said Ben Ruthe.

"Some of them don't - some have aggressive coaches that want to squeeze whatever talent they can out of the athletes while they're there, rather than build Olympians."

Fortunately, a whole generation of Kiwis has found success down this route, led by Willis, Tanner, world indoor 1500-metre champion Geordie Beamish, four-time NCAA champion Kimberley Smith and two-time 1500-metre winner Maia Ramsden.

"I don't want to tell Sam what to do, but I'm still strongly of the opinion that going to an American university is a once-in-a-lifetime life experience," said Willis.

"The burnout happened in the past when 90 percent of the coaches didn't know what they're doing, but they're all incredibly good now.

"The success you see on an athletic stage at the Olympics, 80 percent of that performance comes from the collegiate system, so it really is the proving ground to perform at the highest level.

"You can't turn down a million-dollar opportunity when the coaching is equally as good as anywhere else and there's not the same risk of burnout as in the past."

As well as providing quality education, recent changes to the US college system mean student-athletes are now virtually professional.

Willis points out that the football quarterback at Michigan University - his alma mater - will earn US$12m next season and athletes are extending their university careers to take advantage of those payouts.

With his contacts and current level of performance, Sam Ruthe would be snapped up by any major university, but dad Ben sees another option, following in the footsteps of Aussie prodigy Meyers, a 3m 50s miler at 18.

"One of the craziest things is Sam can't go to college until August 2028," said Ben Ruthe.

"He's got almost four more years, but he's already running faster than anyone leaving high school ever has to go on scholarship.

"Who knows what the future holds, but if he carries on remotely on the same trajectory, one of the alternative options would be going professional after high school.

"The key would be wrapping a support network around that, so he's not on his own."

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