This morning I got up a 4am so that I would be at the PT field on time at 4:30 for the 4-mile ruck march. I was expecting it to be rather easy since it was only 4 miles, the ruck was only 35 lbs, and we had an hour and twenty minutes to complete it. We stepped off at 5am, and right away I noticed the pace was a little faster than I expected. We were doing a 15 min/mile pace instead of a 20 min/mile pace. Although I had to lengthen my stride a bit more it wasn't too bad. Around the third mile I noticed that my ruck was digging into my back a bit more than I had expected, and when I reached behind to make sure my kidneypad was in place I couldn't find it anywhere. This occured right around the time we got to the hilly portion of the march. The pace did slow down to a 20 min/mile pace at that point, which was nice because I spent the rest of the march with my right hand behind my back acting as a pad between my ruck and my back so that the metal wouldn't dig into me anymore. The TAC came over at one point to see why I had my hand behind my back. His attempt to fix the problem ended with him basically completely detaching my kidneypad from my ruck, so it stopped providing any support at all. Before it had helped support some of the wieght onto my hips on the left side and my right hand made up some of the difference on the right side. At least it was only a 4-mile ruck march. I'll be sure to either fix my ruck or DX it before I need to use it again. The nice thing is that we finished with eight minutes to spare, and that translated into a lot of extra time between PT and class.