WALNUT — A half hour after completing his first 3,000-meter steeplechase since 2018, Evan Jager, the most dominant steeplechaser in American history, was still trying to make sense of the race and the four years of uncertainty leading up to a night he and many in the sport questioned would ever happen.

“You know, it’s been so long that I didn’t really know what to think about kind of going into the race,” Jager said. “I wasn’t super anxious. I wasn’t overly nervous, I was not like super excited, it’s not like … like a little surreal, like I didn’t actually believe that it was happening. I just wanted to get through the race and kind of just not really worry about anything until after I actually crossed that finish line and got an entire steeple under my belt.”

Jager’s return to an event in which he earned an Olympic silver medal didn’t come with the Hollywood ending. Or at least not yet. But then again after rising to the top of an event with such seeming ease, nothing about Jager’s past four years, four seasons riddled with injuries, frustration and doubt, has been neat and tidy.

Jager seemed destined to run away with the race at the 62nd Mt. SAC Relays Thursday night, bursting into the lead with 300 meters to go and opening a gap on the rest of the field. But by the final water jump Honda’s Ryoma Aoki regained the lead and then held Jager off down the homestretch 8 minutes, 33.33 seconds to 8:34.89.

Jager’s time was well off the World Championships qualifying standard of 8:22.00 but such a time now seemed like a formality on a night that ended with a sense of optimism and possibility instead of more frustration. The real triumph was Jager finishing and vanquishing a question mark that had hung over him as he missed the 2019 World Championships and the 2021 Olympic Games: would he ever finish another steeplechase?

“Yeah, yeah, I don’t really feel like I’ve fully processed it yet,” he said. “I think I’m a little disappointed that I ran that slow, but yeah, I guess like, I think the biggest thing for me was yesterday doing pre-meet, just like feeling good enough to know that I could actually get through a whole steeple.”

It was a belief he often struggled to find in the darkness of the previous four years.

“Obviously, it’s been extremely hard,” Jager said. “Definitely like at times over the last four years, the saddest, the most depressed I’ve ever been, most frustrated, yeah, some truly, truly terrible days. Yeah. There’s not much more I can say about it. Just like really, really bad days.

“And, I think I’m just too stubborn to just stop. And especially, I think for me stopping at that point, it wasn’t the fact that I was as fit as I could possibly be at the time and I still couldn’t do it. It was just my body was kind of betraying me. So there was still always that belief that if I got healthy again I could do it. So, I think just stubbornness I guess.”

No American athlete has dominated a track event this century like Jager, 33, has the steeplechase. Jager owns the nine fastest steeplechases in U.S. history. But he wasn’t just the best American. Jager was a perennial medal contender in an event dominated by Kenya since the 1968 Olympic Games. His silver medal at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro was the best finish by an American in the event since 1952.

On the Fourth of July 2015, Jager, was headed toward a certain win in Paris, a rarity for an American distance runner in a Diamond League event, and the first ever sub-8:00 clocking by athlete of non-African descent. But a step after clearing the final barrier, he stumbled and fell to the track. He scrambled across the finish line in second at 8:00.45.

Jager was born and raised in Algonquin, Illinois, 40 miles north of Chicago. He was the U.S. Junior 1,500 meter champion as a Wisconsin freshman in 2008 before turning pro that September, following Badgers’ coach Jerry Schumacher to Beaverton, Oregon and what became the Bowerman Track Club, named after Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman, the iconic Oregon coach.

Jager made the U.S. team in the 5,000 for the 2009 World Championships but was unable to book a return trip to Worlds in 2011, finishing 12th in the 1,500 at the U.S. Championships. Encouraged by Schumacher and Bowerman assistant Pascal Dobert, a 2000 Olympian in the steeple, Jager made his debut in the event at the Mt. SAC Relays in April 2012, winning in 8:26.14. He won the Olympic Trials that June, the first of seven consecutive U.S. titles. A month later he was the American record holder at 8:06.81. By August he was sixth in the Olympic Games. A year before no American had ranked among the Top 30 in the world in the event.

In 2017, he followed up his Olympic silver medal with a bronze at the World Championships and a Diamond League victory in Monaco in the year’s world leading time of 8:01.29. Jager was the only runner to post one of the world’s three fastest times in each of the seasons between 2015 and 2018.

Suddenly it wasn’t far-fetched to wonder if an American couldn’t loosen Kenya’s decades-long hold on steeplechase gold at the 2019 Worlds and 2020 Olympic Games.

The steeplechase, however, is the most unforgiving of events and heartbreak is always lurking at the next hurdle. Jager suffered a stress fracture during a heavy landing on the water jump while racing at the Weltklasse meet in Zurich in August 2018.

He missed the entire 2019 season, wondering if he would ever run the steeple again.

” One of the worst days was… most of them were in 2019, a couple of them have been since,” Jager said. “I think one of the worst days was I was still, … I injured the foot initially, took a little bit of time off and then basically trained on an undiagnosed stress fracture for six months. And I really started developing some really bad compensation patterns and mechanics and started feeling totally unlike myself, like I couldn’t really control my body, and I couldn’t figure out why, because we kept being told that the foot should have been healed and it was probably just phantom pain. And the bone itself should be fine. And so I was kind of just forcing myself to keep training, telling myself, ‘It should be fine, it should be fine.’ And I think just going through workouts, getting what felt like 50 percent out of my body and not feeling like myself running. That was the most frustrating part is like trying to force your body to feel good and you just can’t do it. While all the while the foot is hurting every step.

“And so, that and then just I think random days where the season was getting away from me, whether it was 2019 or 2021, and kind of having the idea in the back of my head, like for most of the year, that it probably wasn’t going to work out in my favor and I wasn’t going to either make the team or be able to run. And just having the random days where it felt like a complete realization that it wasn’t going to happen. And I would just like break down on those days and just kind of feel like it was hopeless. And I think the biggest thing was not even like the goals that I had for myself. It was more so the feeling that I was never going to get back to being the same runner I was. And that was definitely the hardest part. Because you have the constant daily stress of the pain, and the injury, and on top of that the realization that your dreams are slipping away from you. And so those were the hardest days. Kind of like you’d have all of these realizations come crashing together and it would just make it more real.”

Evan Jager of the USA did not finish the 3000 Meter Steeplerchase during the 2021 USATF Golden Games and Distance Open at MT. SAC in Walnut on Sunday, May 9, 2021. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/ SCNG)

In January 2020 he resumed hurdling for the first time in 17 months. A month later he was encouraged by a 3:56.50 indoor mile win in Seattle. But the pandemic delayed his return to the steeplechase. At the Golden Games last May at Mt. SAC, he paced Bowerman teammate Sean McGorty through the first 2,000 meters of the steeplechase before dropping out as planned. Jager was confident he could still make a third Olympic team in June.

But he developed a calf injury during track work-outs after the Mt. SAC race. Exams eventually revealed 16 centimeters of torn muscle. Jager spent the Olympic Trials in a walking boot watching from the Hayward Field seats.

“On one side, I questioned it, and then on the other side I still just have deep belief in myself,” he said. “Even on the absolute worst days, or maybe not on the worst days but the day after the absolute worst days, I was always able to tell myself, ‘If you get healthy again, you can get back to that level of running.’ And so the focus wasn’t always getting fit enough to be the old runner that I was, it’s more the first step was just getting healthy enough to being able to do that. Sometimes that just takes time. Sometimes it takes a lot of hard work, through rehab and stuff, taking care of the body, taking a step back. I mean, I didn’t do the things the right way all the time. But I kept the belief, and I think that’s the biggest part.”

And so as Thursday night grew cool, Jager toed the starting line, healthy and confident.

“I think that was the biggest relief for me was actually yesterday, because even though I paced Sean in the steeple here last year, I didn’t even really feel good enough in pre-meet the day before to like really be confident that I was actually going to rabbit,” Jager said. “And so yesterday was the first time in four years where I felt confident in my body to actually get through a full steeple.

“And so, that’s obviously the first step and now we’ve got two months to work on fitness and get ready for U.S. champs, which I’m confident that we’ll be able to get there and get in really good shape before USAs, just because we’ll get back to track work at Flagstaff back to altitude and I’ll just get fitter and fitter over the next two months. So I feel confident about that. But just the biggest thing was just coming here and feeling healthy enough to be able to complete steeple.”

He also recognizes he remains a work in progress.

“I was hoping I would have felt that way running more like 8:20, 8:22,” Jager said. “It definitely felt harder than I expected, but we really laid off the track work after the indoor season and that 10K, we just went back to base phase and our track work consisted of 200s and 300s after hills. So definitely nothing specific for racing, so I guess I’m not super surprised that I didn’t feel great, but I just would have preferred feeling a little bit better at that pace, but honestly Jerry kept telling me not to have any hopes or any preconceived notions of what the race was going to be like and just go through it and just race it, and not worry about what the end result was. So I guess my goal going in was just to wait until 800 to go and if I felt good maybe push the last 800 and try to win the race, but the big goal was just getting through the race and just feeling what that felt like again. Just completing the race, actually.”

He was a long way from Rio in 2016 or Monaco in 2017. But he was also a long way from limping through the doubt, the darkness of 2019.

And 2020.

And 2021.

And for 100 meters or so down the final backstretch Thursday night it wasn’t hard to envision Jager battling the Kenyans, Morocco’s Soufiane El Bakkali, the 2021 Olympic champion, again down another backstretch at this summer’s World Championships in Eugene.

“It felt good,” Jager said still processing Thursday’s race. “It was I guess … just like happy, I think. I was just happy that I could get back to this place because, I mean, probably just about every single day over the last four years I questioned whether or not I could actually run a steeple again. So, it’s good to feel healthy again and feel like, just know that I can do it. So now I’ve just got to get fit. That’s the fun part.”

NOTE: Canadian middle distance runner Gabriela DeBues-Stafford recently announced on social media she was leaving the Bowerman group because of concerns about Schumacher’s continued involvement with Shelby Houlihan, the American record-holder at 1,500 and 5,000 meters, who was banned for four years in 2021 after testing positive for the banned performance enhancing substance nandrolone. Houlihan continues to train while awaiting her appeal of the ban with a Swiss tribunal.

Jager said he didn’t have any comment on DeBues-Stafford’s statement.

“No, she said everything that she wanted to say,” he said. “I feel like that’s her decision; it wasn’t my decision, so I feel like everything you guys want to know should come from her.”

He added, “Yes, I’m comfortable the way things are.”

62nd MT. SAC RELAYS/USA TRACK AND FIELD GOLDEN GAMESWhen/Where: Saturday, 9 a.m.-8:15 p.m. (Golden Games 2-4 pm)/Hilmer Lodge Stadium, Walnut

TV: CNBC 2 p.m.

What to watch for: The world’s largest track meet returns a renovated stadium with a field worthy of the setting and the meet’s history. Jamaica’s Elaine Thompson-Herah, the 2016 and 2021 Olympic 100 and 200-meter champion is scheduled to run both events. The men’s 200 features perhaps the two most versatile sprinters on the planet: Fred Kerley and Michael Norman. Kerley, the Olympic silver medalist in the 100, leads the world this season in the 200 (20.04) and 400 (44.47) and is third in the 100 (9.99). Norman is the fourth fastest man in history at 400 (43.45). The 200 field also includes Olympic 400 hurdles runner-up Rai Benjamin and Christian Coleman, the 2019 World 100 champion. Olympic discus champion Valarie Allman returns to action after throwing an American record 234-feet, 5 1/4 inches April 8. It was the world’s longest throw in 30 years.

For more information: http://www.runmtsac.com