Bonk Blog

"Don't get Dotsie Bausch wrong. She'd love to be in London for the opening ceremony. It's why she gets on her bike every day. It's why she pushes through long workouts even when the heat and the fatigue are getting the best of her.

It's why, at 38, she has a world record but doesn't have a real job.

But given what Bausch has endured to get this far, she isn't about to let a bike race -- even one with an Olympic berth at stake -- define her success.

“In the grand scheme of life and what's happening in our world, it's just a big sporting event,” she says. “It would be thrilling. For me personally, it would almost be like a miracle.”

Bausch knows about miracles because her still being alive qualifies as one.

A little more than a decade ago, wracked by drug abuse and anorexia, the 5-foot-9 former fashion model had withered to 90 pounds. Her memory faded. Hair fell out in clumps.

Yet that was just what others saw. The biggest battle Bausch was fighting was with her eating disorders. And that was taking place where no one could see it.

“It's all up here,” she says, tapping a temple. “It's a complete and total invasion of your brain space. It takes over everything. Your whole navigation through your day is thinking about that and things related to that.”

Then Bausch happened upon a flyer for an AIDS fundraising bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles. A group of friends talked her into giving it a try, and with a little training she completed the weeklong tour.

Soon she found that she could channel the compulsions that fueled her anorexia and cocaine use in positive ways as an athlete.

“That same personality that thrives on the bike, the dark side of the personality is taking things to extreme,” says Bausch, who lives with her husband Kirk and two yappy Chihuahuas, Yodi and Minnie, in Irvine.

So at 25 she channeled that energy into cycling and three years later she won the 2001 California State Road Race Championship and finished fourth in the national championships.

Since then she has won six national titles, two Pan Am gold medals and last year she rode on a team that broke the world record in the women's team pursuit, her specialty. The U.S. team will officially be announced in June.

Now Bausch, who once said she couldn't control her own mind, lectures on courage and mental toughness, drawing lessons from her recent past.

“You have a sense of ‘when this is really hard, nothing compares to what it was before.’ And then you just have a different appreciation for the gift,” she says. “I feel like this whole process is a gift. If you would have seen me back then, you would be like, ‘There is no possible way that body to going to even recover to live a normal life, much less be an athlete that can be an Olympian.’”

One year from now, she may be just that."

— Kevin Baxter, Photograph by Wally Skalij.