May 01--McHenry senior Jesse Reiser quietly goes about his business. He's fast, but not flashy. You'll have to find a record book to learn of his accomplishments, because he won't educate you unsolicited.
What happens in the quiet, mostly empty McHenry weight room on a nondescript Wednesday has made Reiser one of the nation's top distance runners.
Only junior Michael Hahndorf sticks around with Reiser during their nearly hour-long post-practice workout. Reiser's right hamstring is injured, and as a result, his hips are out of sync. That's no excuse. He stays to stretch his legs, strengthen his abs and take a therapeutic ice bath.
Half a mile away, his name dots the record board at McHenry's track. Two thousand miles away, his name topped the leaderboard April 11 at the Arcadia Invitational in California, where Reiser ran 3200 meters in 8 minutes, 52 seconds -- the fastest two miles this season for any high school runner in the country.
Reiser has not lost an in-state race two miles or longer since the 2013 Class 3A cross-country state finals, where he placed second. He's the two-time Gatorade runner of the year in Illinois and an overwhelming favorite to repeat in the 3200 at state next month.
"He's actually a state-ranked shot-putter, too," McHenry distance coach Jim Wheeler said with a telling smile.
Well, that part isn't quite true.
Reiser started his track career in junior high, where he preferred field events and shorter races, purportedly for a simple reason.
"I was lazy," he said. "Once I compared my times to other people, I wasn't really that quick of a sprinter, so I chose distance."
He placed 14th at the Class 3A Palatine Regional his freshman cross-country season and did not qualify for the state meet.
Track brought a fresh start, and Reiser finished second at sectionals and 22nd at state in the 3200 as a freshman. From there, Wheeler knew he had a special runner.
"His freshman track season, every big meet the two-mile just kept getting better and better by chunks of time, 10-15 seconds every time he raced," Wheeler said.
Reiser placed seventh at the state cross-country meet as a sophomore, which he finished in 14:33 -- 76 seconds faster than his non-qualifying regional time the previous year.
McHenry isn't a hotbed for distance runners -- 2002 graduate Dave Carlson (Eastern Illinois) was the last to run at a Division I school, according to Wheeler. But Reiser's trying to change that, and his tutelage of Hahndorf shows it might be working.
"Right now, (Hahndorf is) my closest competition," Reiser said. "It's pretty hard to stay motivated, especially when the weather's bad, but having your teammates out running with you every day really makes it easier and more fun. Just having success in the past and wanting it in the future keeps me going every day."
Next year, Reiser will run for Illinois. He's already acquainted with most of the Illini distance runners, who are almost exclusively in-state recruits. He'll be joined in Champaign by Class 3A state cross-country runner-up, Conant's Zach Dale.
The rest of the season will be crunch time for Reiser. Wheeler and head coach Dennis Hutchinson agreed Reiser should mostly run shorter events to save his legs for the 3200 in the five top meets.
He won at Arcadia and the McHenry County Championships, and he'll run the two-mile again at the Fox Valley Conference Championships, Class 3A Rockford Guilford Sectional and the state meet.
"He'll come out here and race every workout like it's a race and like it's his last one," Hutchinson said. "Injury or not, he'll run himself into the ground if he needs to."
