“Obviously, not the video I was hoping to be putting out today,” Matt Hanson says in the start of the video that he shared on YouTube yesterday, announcing that he won’t be racing at the Ironman 70.3 World Championship on Sep. 19. “If you have followed along at all this summer, you know that I have been dealing with a knee issue ever since Ironman 70.3 St. George. It flared up right after that race, and I’ve basically been fighting with it all summer. Every time I get into a decent groove, I get a setback.”
Despite the struggle that Hanson already had with his knee, he decided to start The Collins Cup in Samorin in the final weekend of August. He finished second, battling with Braden Currie (1st place for Team International) and Patrick Lange (3rd place for Team Europe). “I was able to get some short runs in during race week and do all the awkward jogging that I thought I had to do to still put together a good race at The Collins Cup and have a good showing. But unfortunately, it wasn’t in the cards. At some point in the race, the meniscus tear that I have been dealing with flapped over and I wasn’t able to fully extend my knee anymore.”
As Hanson could barely walk the days after the event, he had to decide to pull out of the Ironman 70.3 World Championship. Instead, he will get surgery on his knee next week. “I want to get this done as quickly as possible, because I’ve been dealing with it since May. This also gives me the biggest amount of time to be able to be all in for Kona. I really thought long and hard about trying to give it a go at the Ironman 70.3 World Championship, or even for a brief moment I thought about just doing the swim and the bike, but in the end it doesn’t make sense to do that. If I’m going to go to a World Championship race, I need to be ready to have a World Championship performance.”
