Longtime road warrior Patrick Rizzo will race in the U.S. Mountain Running Championships at Loon Mountain Resort in New Hampshire on Sunday. He's leaving his road racing career behind and hitting the trails. With Sketchers as his new sponsor, he has a slate of mountain/ultra/trail races set for 2016.

Rizzo is 32, but still has the wheels to run fast. He knocked out a 1:04 half marathon earlier this year. But he says it's time for some new goals. He and his wife, Emily, recently purchased a home in southwest Colorado Springs (near some great trails) and he has found a place in the MUT community, training with the likes of Pikes Peak-area runners Joe Gray, Zach Miller and Dan Vega.

We met at the Runners Roost in downtown Colorado Springs and turned on the tape recorder. Here is the interview, edited slightly for clarity.

You had a good first trail race in Nebraska? I ran in the Ne Bthaska Ke trail race in Louisville, Nebraska. I was just kind of breaking the ice there. I had a really good time. The race director is a guy I’ve known my entire career. I jumped in on a “hey,why don’t you?” I wound up winning the race and breaking the course record, but that race was insanely difficult for a Nebraska 12K. It’s right along the Platte River and it’s just bluffs. You are basically scaling for part of it, it’s just straight up and down. I was not expecting that for Nebraska because every part of Lincoln, Neb., is pancake flat.

Now you’re off to the U.S. Mountain Running Championships in New Hampshire: It’s going to be a real litmus test for what I can actually do. I really don’t know what I can accomplish on a trail in a mountain type setting. I’ve heard about the Upper Walking Boss (steep part of the course at Loon Mountain Resort) … I don’t know about this. Everyone is holding it over my head, telling me you have no idea how tough it is. So I like to think that maybe now I’m overcompensating (training harder) and I’m going to come in incredibly fit. And that’s where I’m going to be able to shine.

What other trail/mountain races are on your schedule? The Leadville 50. So I will do an ultra this year. I’m going suicidal right off the bat! And why not just do it at 10,000-plus feet? How hard can it be? I’ve raced marathons two weeks apart, now I’ll run two marathons two minutes apart. But I’m optimistic. I’m also planning the 30K on High Drive (the U.S. 30K National Championshps.) That one is going to be brutal. I don’t know what I’m thinking, but this is the difference between where I was at on the roads, and where I’m at right now on the trails. Toward the end, on the roads, I was fearing going into races. Now I’m like, put me in everything! I’m just really looking forward to it. I’m excited.

So you feel like you have a fresh start? Mentally, it’s a fresh start. I feel now like I felt 10 years ago on the road. Man, I don’t know what I can do. I can’t wait to prove that I can do something. And I haven’t had that feeling on the road. I’ve felt like I have to defend what I am on the road. And I think there is a point in everyone’s career when you have the weight of the world on your shoulders, or at least you feel that way. And I’m just happy to get away from that. Running needs to be fun for me to want to do it. I’ve never wanted to do this for the money. I’ve done it because I love doing it. A lot of people say it’s cliché but I think it’s true: If you love doing something enough, you’re going to succeed at it and you’ll find a way to make it a living.

You’ve been training with some of the best mountain runners out there, Joe Gray, Zach Miller, Dan Vega: I’m still getting used to the difference between the road and the trail and mountain stuff. Road running, you kind of set a gear and you hold it constant, you can set cruise control. When you’re doing mountain running … I’ll do a lot of runs with Dan, we’ll do trail runs together on Wednesday morning. And I’m like, man, I feel like I’m going so slow. Then we’ll hit a mountain portion and I’m like, ‘good lord, how do you breathe on this thing?’ But mainly the downhill is where I need a lot of work. I’m still fearful and apparently you just need to get reckless. That is my last real hitch. I’m not confident enough in my ability to land.

( Photo: Rizzo, Gray, Miller and the Incline King Roger Austin)

What brought you to trails, you’re still a 1:04 half marathon guy? This going to sound terrible, but I’m out of goals on the road. I’ve accomplished what I think I can reasonably accomplish without sacrificing my family. And that just means I need a new set of goals. I’m going to move to trail and mountain stuff because that’s what I’m having fun with. And I think fun dictates success in a large way. We’re not a lucrative enough sport that you can pull a Dick Butkus (Chicago Bears linebacker), and your last few years you’re playing with a broken back with a brace on and trying to make it to the next day so you have money to retire. You won’t have money to retire from this sport, it’s just the reality of it. Retirement (in running) means you get a real job. And I hate that we have to say “real job” where other sports don’t, as if this isn’t a real job that I’ve had the last 10 years that has supported me. But people don’t consider it a sport, people don’t consider it a real job, but knock on wood, I’ve been able to make a living at it for 10 years.

You’ve made it on sponsorhips? I started out with Hansons-Brooks Distance Project in Michigan. I was there for three and a half years. Then I spent about six months without a sponsor when I moved to Boulder. Got picked up by Mizuno. Ran for Mizuno until December of 2014. All of 2015 I went unsponsored. In January this year I contacted Sketchers. I really like their product and they sent me a contract that included just road stuff. I got back to them and said, ‘this isn’t real public, but I’m tired. I’m done with the road. I love running on mountains and trails, I would like to rewrite a contract for mountain/trails stuff.’ And they accepted that. I wrote up a counter offer with mountain and trail bonuses written in instead of road, and they accepted everything, so I guess I did an all right job there.

So you’re done with the road?: I still have my IAAF Bronze Label status. I’m going to try to run a race in Nice, France, in November. France is one of the few places I always wanted to race and have never gotten to. I can speak the language fluently, I love the area. It’s the Nice Marathon. I know they were approaching Sketchers about being the official sponsor for it. So that would be an added bonus if I get to run a Sketchers race internationally and it’s my final marathon. I thought Colfax would be my final marathon, but I was wrong. I do want to run one more internationally, but that will probably sum it up for me on the road. I might jump in here and there for speed work, but it won’t be the focus of what I do. The road always has a part of training. There is stuff you can do on a road you can’t do on a trail. There is stuff you can do on a trail that you can’t do on the road. That’s a big part of why I’ve made it nearly 20 years now in this sport without getting any injuries. Barring getting hit by a car, which I can’t really count, I’ve been injured two days ever in my career. I fell on a downhill and strained my hamstring, and slid on some ice and tweaked by knee. Each one was a one-day injury.

Finish in the top six at Loon you going to the World Mountain Running Championships: It’s a different type of racing and I need to respect the guys that are out there doing it. Some of those mountain guys I know I can beat up on the roads. But some of them are really trail-specific racers and really mountain-specific racers. They’re great climbers, they’re great anaerobic work horses who just don’t have the leg turnover for a lot of fast road stuff. I’ve never been a leg turnover kind of guy either. It doesn’t take a lot of leg speed to run five-minute miles repeatedly.

One of my old teammates at Hansons, Clint Baron, used to have what he called the rule of five minutes. If you run a five-minute mile in high school, you’re doing pretty well. If you run five-minute miles in college in a 10K, you’re doing pretty well. If you run five minutes per mile in a marathon after college, you’re doing really well. You’re whole life is to run five-minute miles over longer and longer distances, and you move up the ranks really quickly.

It doesn’t take a lot to run a 1:04 half marathon. That said, I’ve only done it twice. But it doesn’t take a whole lot of talent to do that. I don’t have the leg turnover that other guys have. But I do have anaerobic capacity and leg turnover is my limit. So I think I’m going to shine a little more on trails and mountains.Some of the workouts I’ve done with Joe have shown me I can at least live through it, and I can hang with somebody who I think is one of the best mountain runners in the country.

When did you fall in love with running? If I had to answer that I’d say never. I never fell in love with running. It came to me. When I was in high school I was a wrestler. I Iove the sport. It teaches discipline like nothing else. If I ever go back to coaching, it will probably be wrestling.

I went deaf my sophomore year in high school. I had an allergic reaction to getting my braces on. I was totally deaf for two years. Lost my equilibrium. I couldn’t walk a straight line down a hall without holding onto a locker. There were a lot of days I’d be walking from class to class and throw up because I was too dizzy. I got my braces off and got my hearing back in my right ear only. During the deafness, I kind of decided … I always run to stay in shape for wrestling, I think I can do this reasonably well. I’m just going to have to commit to what I’m doing, and commit it entirely to running instead of wrestling.

And I had a fantastic high school coach, Jim McNider, who was in the 1980 Olympic trials and is a guy I still look up to this day. He is one of my mentors and heroes in this sport. It’s great to have someone like that showing me the way through. If you teach somebody to love what they’re doing, they’re going to do it incredibly well. That's what he did. They’re going to want to do it well and they’re going to want to be at their best. I like to think back on that when I’m having those days … not every day you feel great. You grunt through most days and live for the good ones. I think about how much running means to him, and how much he taught me to love it, and how much he means to me, too. We still keep in contact and that’s a lot of what keeps me driving.

There are certain days I’m not motivated to go outside and run. That happens to everybody on every level. You have days, you wake up and you’d rather lay in bed with your wife and drink a cup of coffee. But you get out and you know what you want to do and you know that this is part of a broader picture. You still need to make that brush stroke to paint the picture. Unlike some other lines of work, it’s not like in running you can make up work. If I miss today, I can’t go back tomorrow and make it up.

You’re one of the people leading the charge in taking down the dopers: I’d love to. I wouldn’t say I’m taking down anything. It’s more that I’m helping to try to crack some cases. I hate people trying to cheat. I think fair sport and clean sport is really the purist way we can compete. I’m an old school purist, I think we should be playing on a level playing field. If somebody is getting an unfair advantage, that takes away from principal of competition, because then it’s no longer man against man, it's man against science or man against pharmaceutical lab. And that isn’t fair competition.

I don’t know that there is even a place in sport for drug. Some people say why don’t you have a drug division and clean division and let the druggies die soon. Do whatever, have these amazing performances, see a six-second 100 because people don’t care how much they’re on. But the more research that goes into developing those drugs, the more they creep into the pure side. Even 30 or 40 years ago, you didn’t have the prevalence of drugs that you have now. But we’re one of the few countries that hasn’t criminalized doping in sport. All we’ve taught kids today is that if you cheat, you will make millions of dollars and you’ll walk free. That’s a terrible lesson to be teaching from something that should be a beneficial part of life and education.

Is education is the answer to the drug problem? Education is part of it, but we need repercussions that meet what the crime is. It’s not just about the crime of a drugged athlete winning a race. I’ll use (shot putter) Adam Nelson as an example. He won his gold medal in 2004, but didn’t receive it until 2013. His family never got to introduce him as "my brother the Olympic champion, my father the Olympic champion." They never got to take a picture of him standing on the top spot of the Olympic podium with the Star Spangled Banner playing and the flag flying the background. And that is a true tragedy. He never got to have those experiences, which were absolutely robbed from him.

Financial stuff aside, I don’t understand how it’s not fraud, to fraudulently perform at a certain level against the rules. I’m not a lawyer but I feel like this should be illegal. It’s false premise, and that’s fraud. These people are misrepresenting what they are actually doing, what they are capable of doing, and they’re stealing the valor of people who have really earned it.

We need to do a better job of testing. I understand that it’s expensive for something that does not produce a profit. Maybe we have a tariff on our earnings as athletes that goes into a pool that goes toward anti-doping. If we say, you know what, it’s worth it to me to contribute three percent, five percent. Or maybe it falls on the race directors. If you want an event that is sanctioned by USA Track and Field, then you pay X amount into the anti-doping pool.

What about therapeutic use exemptions? I don’t think they should be allowed for prohibited substances. If it’s prohibited, it’s prohibited for all and always. If I can’t use testosterone to run a 1:50 marathon, then you can’t use it just because you’ve depleted your body of testosterone and can’t recover from a regular workout. I would love to eventually take a job with USADA because I think you need some new blood and some new ideas coming in there.

(All photos courtesy of Patrick Rizzo)