At age 18, Kate Badgett was your typical young runner. She clocked about 20 miles a week, usually on the road, and took spin classes and did basic core work to cross-train. However, like other dedicated athletes, she soon experienced a femoral stress fracture, a hairline fracture of the thigh bone.
This type of injury is typically the result of overuse, but Badgett’s weekly mileage didn’t seem high enough for the two to be correlated. She started experiencing other pain, including partial dislocations of her shoulder. Badgett’s case suddenly felt anything but typical. Her physical therapist began to wonder if joint hypermobility, a greater-than-average range of motion in your joints, was at the root of the problem. Turns out, he was right.
Badgett has hypermobile joints due to Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder that causes the ligaments to become looser and stretchier. She experienced two more femoral stress fractures over the next six years. (She later discovered that they were caused by extensive hypermobility and instability through her feet and ankles that placed too much pressure and…
