The Rebuild // 01
Lucy Downs (Left) with Cali Simon (Right)
I’ve Always Been an Athlete.
It’s February, and my friends are out riding their bikes.
I’m on the couch.
I’ve been told to limit my activity because I have a stress fracture in my femoral neck, which is about as fun as it sounds.
For someone who is used to planning her days around training, suddenly being told not to do much of anything gives you a lot of time to think.
Probably too much time.
And lately, I keep coming back to the same question:
How did I get here?
Because this didn’t start with my hip.
It didn’t start with triathlon.
The further back I look, the more I realize this story started a long time ago.
So I guess that’s where I need to start.
I’ve always been an athlete
Sports were just part of growing up.
I swam, ran, played tennis, rode horses and was pretty much always doing something.
Except cycling.
I hated riding a bike when I was little.
My parents eventually figured out that a Starbucks lemon loaf or a mocha Frappuccino was usually enough to convince me to go ride with them.
Considering I’m currently sitting on the couch wishing I could be out riding my bike, that worked out pretty well for them.
Swimming was always my main sport.
I loved competing, having something to train for and seeing myself improve. I also learned pretty early that once I decide I want to do something, I’m probably going to find a way to do it.
That stubbornness has served me really well in sport.
I’m starting to realize it has another side too.
Somewhere along the way, food got complicated
In high school, I developed an eating disorder.
It didn’t happen overnight.
I became more conscious of food, then more restrictive. There were more rules about what I could eat, what I shouldn’t eat and how much was okay.
Eventually, food was taking up way more space in my head than it ever should have.
At the same time, I was still training and competing.
I didn’t understand energy availability or how much fuel my body actually needed for everything I was asking it to do.
I thought I had control.
Really, the rules were starting to control me.
I thought college would fix it
When I left for college, I really thought things would get better.
New environment.
New people.
A chance to start over.
I was going away to swim collegiately, and part of me believed being somewhere new would somehow quiet everything down.
It didn’t.
Turns out, your brain comes with you.
If anything, the thoughts got worse.
Now I was trying to manage all of that while balancing college, training and competing.
I also spent a season running collegiately.
And during track season, I developed my first stress fracture.
The first one
It was in my foot.
At the time, I didn’t see it as anything more than an injury keeping me from doing what I wanted to do.
I wasn’t thinking about nutrition or bone health.
I just wanted it to heal so I could get back to sport.
Sitting here now with a femoral neck stress fracture more than a decade later, it’s hard not to look at that first one differently.
I can’t go back and say exactly what caused it. Bone stress injuries can happen for a lot of reasons, and RED-S wasn’t even remotely on my radar then.
But I can recognize things now that I couldn’t recognize at the time.
That wouldn’t be my last stress fracture.
There would be another during basic training.
Years later, a fibular stress fracture after Boise.
And eventually, the one that put me on this couch.
But we’re not there yet.
Because at that point in college, I had something much more immediate to deal with.
My eating disorder was getting worse.
I needed help.
Eventually, that took me to The Emily Program in Seattle.
And that treatment would basically save my life.
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If you enjoyed reading Lucy’s story, please check out her latest in her blog on Medium.
We look forward to seeing her thrive in her sport and celebrating her journey!
