Hannah Scott has broken so many ribs in her career, she's lost count.
But the 24-year-old from Coleraine, Northern Ireland, doesn't play a high-impact or combat sport. She is an Olympic rower.
"It was something I just accepted and thought was normal," Scott tells BBC Sport. "It's a constant level of pain that kind of becomes normalised because when you're breathing, your ribs are constantly moving.
"Daily activities like laughing, coughing, driving, sleeping become extremely hard. You can't put a cast on your ribs, you just have to work through it."
Rib injuries, including muscular pain, stress fractures and bone breaks, can be common for women in elite rowing, but not always at the rate Scott was suffering.
She sustained her first rib injury aged 18 while studying at Princeton University in the United States and has had at least two injuries every year since, forcing her out of full training for weeks at a time.
But things came to a head last summer when she sustained her most serious injury yet while racing at Henley Royal Regatta, snapping her rib in two.
"My rib was broken in half six weeks before the World Cup and European Championships. It's demoralising because you've just spent a full year training and then half of your racing season is just gone. That was the final line of 'we need to fix this'."
After weeks of tests, Scott was sent for a bone scan and diagnosed with osteopenia, a bone-weakening condition commonly found in older women, prompting her to consider retirement at the age of just 23.
"I just thought, 'I can't keep doing this to my body'," Scott recalls.
"I had lost belief. I was tearing my hair out. British Rowing really picked me up off the ground and said 'we're going to make sure this doesn't happen to you again'."
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