As an aside regarding Hill Harper, his resume says he attended Officer Candidate School for the US Marine Corps in 1986. I attended this same program in the fall of 1986. I asked him about it at a political event (I am active in Michigan's Democratic Party). He was in the summer group a few months before me.

I ended up with injuries to my knees which forced me to DNF from the progam. Crutches for a week and then released home and told I could come back the next year and try again, but I ended up getting married and did not re-apply.

So at a subsequent event, Harper's campaign kickoff in Grand Rapids, he brought up is OCS attendance, but quickly said "But don't worry, I didn't take the commission." WTF? Why did he have to say it that way? To burnish his cred with self-identified progressives he had to say he didn't take the 2nd LT commission? If he was not going to take the commission if offered, why take up a valuable space in the program which only has four platoons? Well, three male platoons and one female platoon. He took a space within 120 people only to NOT take a commission.

Frankly, I was offended and put-off. That blatant pandering to this group of people bothered me as much as his dismissal of the commission. Had I made it through all ten weeks I would have accepted commission and started a career in the USMC.

Anyway, turns out the injury turned out to be IT Band, problem. The band gets tight somewhere along the hip or thigh and doesn't stretch properly causing pain at the terminus on the outside of the knee. I had a recurrence of it in 2007 when I began endurance mountain bike racing doing 12 & 24 mountain bike races. This injury can be alleviated and then prevented by rolling the hip and thigh on a foam roller regularly, which I now do since I continue my bike endurance events (usually 100 mile events).