Medical DQ

Back home now...with some unfortunate news.  I ended up with a medical disqualification on the course, with a "possible partially detached Achilles tendon".

I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I have a guess.  I believe I committed the classic mistake of letting the adrenaline of the event get the better of me, and started out too fast.  I passed the 8 mile mark at a pace that would put me at a sub 6 hour completion, which if you've been reading along the past few months would know that I was hoping for a 6 hour finish but expecting more of a 6 and a half to 7 hour finish this year.  So I was faster than I should have been for at least the first 10 miles.

Then comes the FiveFingers.  As the doctor on the course explained, I was absolutely right that the FiveFingers will do a lot the way I'm using them to offload much of the stress off my knees, which is why my tests in the past have had such positive results in distances I can run without knee pain in them.  The problem as she pointed out is that all that extra stress has to go somewhere, and if you think about it, much of that would be directly on the Achilles   I didn't run into Achilles issues while training because I was training for a more moderate run time.

So I'll let all this settle in for a week or so and figure out what I'm going to do about next year.