When the Paralympic Games Tokyo took place in 2021, Jeremy Van Tress was spending most of his time in his room at his home in Corvallis, Oregon.

Van Tress, a U.S. Army officer who had served with the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan, had been diagnosed with ALS in February 2017. He wasn’t really active. And, at the time, he was getting overweight.

Those Paralympic Games nearly 5,000 miles away changed everything.

“I watched the Paralympics in 2021 and it inspired me quite a bit,” he said. “I decided that I need to start taking baby steps to try to take better care of my health.”

Those baby steps turned into dramatic achievements. Competing in the handcycling MH2 class in toasty Australian summer conditions in January, Van Tress, then 41, won his first world cup medals, capturing silver medals in the time trial and road race in Adelaide.

“I did really well,” he said. “I had a blast.”

It all started with those Paralympic Games in 2021. At the time, Van Tress was inactive, in bed and fitted with a tracheostomy tube and ventilator to assist his breathing.

“I was motivated to more or less just get a little bit more active and spend more time with the family and get out of my room,” Van Tress said. “The Paralympics inspired me to do that.

“Little by little, I got out of the house, out of the room, spent more and more time off the ventilator until I could do about three, four hours off the ventilator. I started doing puzzles and things like that.”

The puzzles led to cycling, with an assist from a tabletop handcycling machine.

“I started on my own to start using that,” Van Tress said. “Little by little. Started with five minutes, then 10 minutes, then 15 minutes. Got to the point where I thought, ‘Well, I saw those handcyclists at the Paralympics. Maybe I should see if the VA will get me one, see if I can start getting on a real bike.’

“The rest is history,” he added with a hearty laugh.

Now Van Tress has hopes of competing in the Paralympic Games this year in Paris.

“Up until this last year, up until Adelaide, I didn’t know how realistic that was going to be,” Van Tress said. “And now, I feel like it’s becoming more a possibility. Definitely, my eyes are set on that. That’s the goal.”

Getting his classification changed from MH3 to MH2 helped. As a cyclist in MH3 last year, Van Tress posted 26th- and 27th-place finishes in the 2023 World Cup Final.

“When I was H3, road races were really hard on me,” he said. “I can’t hydrate like other athletes can.”

Van Tress plans on racing in the U.S. Paralympics Road Cycling Open in Bryan, Texas, in April, a competition that will determine the U.S. roster spots for a pair of world cup stops in Europe in May. The world cup events, along with a U.S. selection event, will determine spots for the Paralympic team.

Van Tress says he faces a “delicate balance” when training, usually hitting about 10 to 13 hours each week.

“I don’t get as much time on the bike as I would like,” he said, “being careful with developing hypoxia (a condition in which the body doesn’t get enough oxygen).”

Van Tress was taken off the tracheostomy tube in February 2022 and hasn’t needed to go back to it.

“My doctors didn’t even think I would make it six months off with my trach,” he said. “It’s lasted over a year now.”

The Paralympic Games helped provide the motivation, but Van Tress’s determination started long before that. He supported himself as a 16-year-old while still in high school, living in an apartment with his older brother. He was the first in his family to attend college, served a two-year church mission in Chile, completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work, and then finished a Doctor of Philosophy degree while being named a Pat Tillman Scholar following his ALS diagnosis and medical retirement from the Army. He had run cross country and track, among other sports.

“All of that helped,” Van Tress said. “I think a number of things kind of made me into who I am and how I’ve kind of dealt with ALS, I guess you’d say, how I’ve kind of bounced back.”

“Part of it was my military training,” he added. “The bikes that I had as an officer in the military, the discipline that I learned from the military, for sure.”

Van Tress has spent much of his time helping others, including Samaritan Health Services, a medical center in Corvallis where he is a medical social worker specializing in helping patients with chronic health conditions.

“I’m not just a Para athlete,” Van Tress said. “I’m a critical social worker, I’m a dad, I’m a husband.”

His wife, Courtney, and six children ranging in age from 7 to 17 have all played a part in Van Tress’s journey, in addition to a number of others, including current coach Mike Durner; Peter Park, director of the Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA) Racing Team; Laura Lee Musson, of Rejuvenation by Blackstone, a provider of light stimulation therapy; Dani Warren, a sales coordinator with Juice Plus+; Jason Young, a chiropractor at Body of Health Chiropractic and Wellness Center in Corvallis; and team staffers at the Willows of the Northwest Massage Therapy and the VA MLS Multidisciplinary Clinic in Portland, Oregon.

“To be fair, I didn’t do this all on my own,” Van Tress said. “In high school, I had coaches and mentors that really just demonstrated good examples. … My church community really just corralled around me, as well, throughout my life. My wife and kids.”

Paul D. Bowker has been writing about Olympic and Paralympic sports since 1996, when he was an assistant bureau chief in Atlanta. He is a freelance contributor to USParaCycling.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.

Paralympic Games Helped Motivate ALS Patient Jeremy Van Tress To Start Racing

Loading...