Dotsie Bausch: Enjoying the ride of her life

There are times when Olympic hopeful Dotsie Bausch is mentoring troubled teens and she sees her old self in them.

It scares her to death.

She remembers what she looked like at half her current weight, cheeks sunken and bones seemingly ready to break through her paper-thin skin. She remembers the pain in the pit of her stomach after she'd portion out 35 calories of food for the day, and the feeling of never being full.

"I don't really recognize her anymore," Bausch says, shaking her head.

The 39-year-old cyclist is sitting alone on a stool in the corner of a ballroom full of Olympic hopefuls, men and women not unlike herself. There are archers and gymnasts and swimmers, many with their own stories of suffering, of rising above adversity. She shakes her head again.

Bausch has a hard time believing she's here, part of a women's pursuit team with gold medal aspirations. She's a strong, healthy former national champion proving against all odds that it's possible to become an elite athlete after overcoming an eating disorder.

"Pick anything: alcohol abuse, eating disorder, addiction. It's what you mask your pain with," Bausch said. "But I do think you can get to 100 percent healing and still use your body in an extreme way, like sport at the highest level."

It doesn't get much higher than the London Olympics.

Looking back, Bausch isn't sure when anorexia first imprisoned her. She doesn't remember when her recreational drug use began. There was no catastrophic event that triggered a downward slide, just the same uncertainties of life that confront most people in their 20s.

She had majored in journalism in college, and was a good student, landing a summer internship at a television station. She quickly came to a sobering realization that she hated it.

So there she was, on the brink of graduation, with no idea what to do with her life.

"I had that really, sort of, 'graduated, out-of-control' feeling," she said. "There's control it takes to not eat, and it was a big source of control I felt I had over my life."

Bausch moved to New York City after finishing up at Villanova, and took a job working for a company that produced commercials and music videos. She also started to rely on her traffic-stopping looks to get part-time work as a model, and it just so happened that the dark secret she had been harboring since graduation worked well in that particular industry.

The less she ate, the thinner she looked. The thinner she looked, the more work she got.

Bausch doesn't believe that her anorexia was tied to her modeling career, although research suggests many fashion models suffer from an eating disorder, primarily anorexia or bulimia. Instead, she believes they worked in concert during a five-year span in which her weight plummeted to below 100 pounds.

It wasn't until she found the right therapist that she started to recover. She spent more than two years going to sessions, and she began to repair strained relationships with friends and family, digging at years of internal turmoil.

All the while she was prohibited from exercising because one of the symptoms of an eating disorder is over-exertion to control weight. Bausch used to run cross country and spent hours in the gym, but her therapist put an end to that.

"That's a very common feature in anorexia nervosa," said Dr. Pamela Keel from the Eating Behaviors Research Clinic at Florida State. "It doesn't appear to be the amount of exercise that matters, though. Instead, the function of exercise appears to be key."

Bausch finally convinced her therapist that she wouldn't go wild, that she would control how much she worked out and do it in a healthy way. Her therapist eventually relented, with a caveat: Bausch had to try something that she'd never done before.

That's how she learned to ride a bike at 26 years old.

"I'd barely been on a bike before," she said, "but for the first time in a really long time, I felt free. That's what I still love about it. Going out and riding 60 or 70 miles, going over terrain you can't walk on, and you can't experience in a car that freedom of your body."

Cycling may not have saved her life, but it's helped her to live a healthy one.

"Just to heal my body again, get the endorphins going, get to sweat - just the simple things we do to release stress," Bausch said. "The wind in my hair and riding around the neighborhood, it was just a big stress reliever."

Weary of her therapists' concerns, Bausch attacked the sport from the word, "Go."

She advanced from a novice to a Category 1 racer, the highest level in USA Cycling, within a year. She became a member of the U.S. national team in 2002, and became a national champion seven times over. She started riding for professional teams including Jazz Apple, Colavita-Sutter Home and T-Mobile in some of the biggest races around the world.

Around the same time, she partnered with former Olympic track coach Andy Sparks to form Empower Coaching Systems, where they "emphasize the importance of the mind and body in balance."

"She was sort of a late start to the sport," said Sparks, whose wife is four-time world champion Sarah Hammer. "I think what appealed to her about it is that she controls her success."

Just like Bausch once controlled her weight.

She switched from road racing to track cycling a few years ago, eager for a new challenge, and quickly teamed with Hammer and Lauren Tamayo to form an elite pursuit team. Together they set a new world record during the 2010 Pan Am Championships in Aguascalientes, Mexico.

"She's such a strong rider," said Hammer, who is also among the favorites in the omnium at the London Olympics. "And considering where she's come from, that's absolutely amazing."

Bausch knows that this is likely her one and only Olympics, and that her years of competitive riding may soon be over - "I mean, that's just sad," she said. But she also knows that her story has the potential to inspire other young men and women dealing with eating disorders.

According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, about 24 million people of all ages and genders suffer from an eating disorder. Approximately 1 in 5 will die prematurely from related complications, including suicide and heart problems.

Bausch has volunteered for several organizations dedicated to helping people with eating disorders, and she plans to speak at a conference on the subject in November. She also spends much of her spare time mentoring young people who are going through many of the same challenges that she overcame, even though it's not always easy.

That's when she catches glimpses of who she used to be.

"I'll drive home after meeting with someone who is really suffering, and think, 'I don't know if I can go much deeper in this,' but you do," she said. "That to me is the reason, or the reward, for suffering what I did. It's still there, but it's something that I can use to help others."