Olympic silver medalist Evan Jager has announced he will not contest the upcoming US Olympic Trials after failing to recover his health and fitness after a string of injury problems, the most recent of which were multiple tears in his calf.
"I wanted to make a video laying out how the last few months has gone for me," he said in an Instagram post. "Unfortunately my reality is I'm not going to be running the trials this year, which sucks. I've had quite a few issues this year, stemming back to the middle of February, rolling my ankle really bad. Getting back into training quickly then developing an achilles issue which lasted all of March until the middle of April, essentially being unable to run for that entire period."
"I started working out with the guys on the team again and got two weeks of running and workouts in before rabbiting Sean (McGorty) in the steeple at Mount Sac and that went well enough that I was extremely optimistic. I had six weeks to get in better shape."
Jager explained he then developed a calf issue following track workouts that plagued him for several weeks.
"It got to the point where it was tight all the time and I was not in a place where I could even work out at a high level. I didn't have the ability to run fast without doing major damage. I got an ultrasound and the doctor found a pool of blood in the soleus/achilles area and he told me he thought I had torn the lateral soleus. I had to make the decision that running the Trials wasn't an option. We got an MRI and not only did I tear the lateral soleus, we tore the lateral gastroc(nemius), I had in total about 16cm of tearing. It showed me we made the right decision in shutting things down and doing everything I can to get healthy.
"It's obviously very disappointing, especially after not being able to run USA's in 2019 and knowing this winter that I had the fitness to make the team - training was going well until March - but with trials looming I felt I was constantly in this place of rushing to get back. It really sucks."