#94: Dotsie Bausch - The Comeback Kid...at 40!
Everyone loves a great comeback story and, as we head into the 4th of July holiday weekend here in the States, we can't think of any better way to celebrate than with the uplifting story of survival and triumph from one of USA's finest - Dotsie Bausch.
Dotsie and her track cycling teammates won the Silver medal at the 2012 London games, which is amazing unto itself; however, when you hear Dotsie’s story of what it took to get there, you’ll be even more astonished.
For years, she battled a debilitating eating disorder which left her on the brink of losing her life. Her recovery is nothing short of remarkable and so is her NEW mission in life -- to save the lives of others as Executive Director and tireless advocate at Switch4Good - the non-profit organization and podcast she started to tackle the ridiculous notion that we need cow’s milk for peak health and performance. It was a bill of goods she was sold for years as an elite-level athlete.
You’ll love hearing about her “underdog” triumph at the Olympics because it’s also how she is approaching her work now. She's most certainly an underdog going up against some powerful organizations out there, but we have no doubt she’ll stand on the podium once again with pride knowing that the power of the Silver medal is saving the lives of millions of children, animals, and our planet.
Episode and PLANTSTRONG Resources:
PLANTSTRONG Summer Grilling Guide
Dotsie Bausch Website and Social Media
Switch4Good Website Live Better. Do More. Dairy Free
Dotsie Bausch
About Dotsie Bausch
After concluding a prolific professional cycling career that produced a medal at the 2012 London Olympic Games, eight US national championships, two Pan American gold medals and a world record, Dotsie Bausch has become a powerful influencer for plant-based eating for athletes and non-athletes alike. Named by VegNews in 2019 as one of the top 20 most influential vegans in the world, she utilizes her degree in plant-based nutrition to inform her impassioned messages as an advocate on behalf of humans, planet earth and animals.
Full Transcript
Dotsie Bausch:
I can say today, there's never a second of any day that I am obsessed with what is going on my plate or how much I'm exercising or what I'm putting in. It's complete joy. It's complete freedom. It's complete love. And I do feel like I owe that to a plant-based diet. I got a lot better obviously and healed, and I was eating animals, but I still didn't have any kind of relationship with fueling myself and how foods made me feel and what it meant to eat certain foods. It was just kind of more mechanical. My husband and I would go out to eat six nights a week. It was just like, yeah, just food, whatever. And now it's just like this. It's just a whole experience of freedom and fulfillment and joy. And it's really cool. So it's definitely the exact opposite of where I was before.
Rip Esselstyn:
Season three of the PLANTSTRONG podcast explores those Galileo moments where you seek to understand the real truth around your health and dare to see the world through a different lens. This season, we honor those courageous seekers who are paving the way for you and me. So grab your telescope, point it towards your future, and let's get PLANTSTRONG together.
Rip Esselstyn:
Hey everybody, I'm Rip Esselstyn. I want to welcome you to the PLANTSTRONG podcast. I really hope your summer is off to a grand start and you are eating up that watermelon, those cherries, strawberries, berries, peaches, nectarines, and you're just lapping it all up, you're fit, you're healthy and you're happy. I want to share with you today, a comeback story that is really phenomenal, and who doesn't love a great comeback story. Today, I'm going to bring you the ultimate redemption story of USA Olympic medalist Dotsie Bausch.
Rip Esselstyn:
In fact, I can't even think of a better way to head into the July 4th weekend than with a inspiring uplifting story of survival and triumph from one of USA's finest. And I am so pumped up right now because we got the Olympic trials going on with the swimming and the track and field and the Paralympics, and it is just getting me so excited for Tokyo, that's just right around the corner. And the story, I should say the conversation that I have today is how Dotsie and her track cycling teammates won the silver medal in the 2012 London Games, which all by itself is incredible.
Rip Esselstyn:
And in fact, this was highlighted in The Game Changers documentary, which I'm sure most of you have seen. But when you hear Dotsie's story and you understand what it took for her to get there, I think you're going to be even more blown away. For years, she battled a debilitating eating disorder, which left her on the brink of literally losing her life. Her recovery that we talk about is nothing short of remarkable, and so is her new mission in life, which is to save the lives of others as executive director and the tireless advocate at the Switch4Good nonprofit organization and podcast that she started specifically to tackle the status quo notion that we need cow's milk for health and performance, a bill of goods that she was sold on for years as an elite level athlete and a bill of goods that literally millions and millions of Americans have been sold on as well.
Rip Esselstyn:
I think you're going to love hearing about her underdog triumph at the Olympics, because it also is how she is approaching her work now. And then she may be an underdog against some of the big, powerful, well-financed organizations that are out there. But I have little doubt that she'll stand on the podium once again with pride, knowing that she has saved the lives of millions of children, animals, and our planet.
Rip Esselstyn:
You have had quite an amazing life. And I want to talk about your journey today. Being an athlete, being a plant-based advocate, somebody who has also battled addictions, right?
Dotsie Bausch:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
And come through that in an amazing way. But I think for starters, if you could share with our audience... I'd love to start with your medal, right? So you won a silver medal in 2012 in London. What was that journey like for you? Meaning, you were an eight time US national champion. You were a two time Pan Am gold medalist. Did you go to the 2008 Olympic games? No.
Dotsie Bausch:
No. I was on the long team, but I didn't make the final team.
Rip Esselstyn:
Okay. Okay. So this is something you want it bad, right?
Dotsie Bausch:
Well, I did. I mean, I started out cycling very late, not until the age of 26 after healing from anorexia. And I really started cycling just as like a vehicle for part recovery and just love of now living out in California and the sun in my face and the wind and the beautiful scenery that we have here, and just continuing my freedom journey from being in the confines of an eating disorder for so long. So it was a bit by mistake that I started cycling.
Dotsie Bausch:
So the journey to the Olympics was 12 years and it was, as you can imagine, everyone's journey with really anything they do just wrought with incredible highs and so many more lows. But as I traversed that journey, for 10 years, I spent racing professionally on the road. So Tour de France type of stage racing. So when I switched over to the track, which is where I eventually won my Olympic medal in, I switched over just out of curiosity really, and because I was scared of the track and I like to tackle things that I'm scared of. And moved over to the track, and it really uncovered where my most talent was, which is kind of that intermediate distance, right?
Dotsie Bausch:
We were using a combination of aerobic and anaerobic efforts, so oxygen and without oxygen. So as I started to race individual pursuit and then team pursuit, I fell madly madly in love with it. And in 2009, they put women's team pursuit into the Olympics. Right? So of course it had been in the Olympic games for 20 years for the men, but they just had slated it in for the 2012 Olympics. So that's the moment that that dream came alive for me, about two and a half, three years out from Olympic games.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. So you spent a lot of years slogging away on the bike doing the the whole professional road cycling. That is such a grind. I can't even imagine.
Dotsie Bausch:
It is. it is. Lot of suffering.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. So you got eight US national championships. What were those in? Was that individual time trial, or what was that in?
Dotsie Bausch:
No, road racing, and then on the track and the individual pursuits. I won nationals in the track seven weeks after I tried the tracks. So that was like a bit of an indicator. The best in the world at the time and the most decorated US tracks cycling female Sarah Hammer, who ended up being my teammate in 2012 that we won the silver with, she was injured. So she and her husband took me under their wing. And I said I want to give this a shot. I had just won some of the biggest prologues in Australia, New Zealand and early season against all the best of Europeans, which is a shorter time trial. So kind of that intermediate distance.
Dotsie Bausch:
And so my coach suggested, maybe call Sarah and Andy and see what might unfold in the individual pursuit, because that's where you have a lot of... you just have a lot of raw talent in that distance. So I was lucky enough that she was injured because I would not have won nationals that year if she wasn't. But it came down to the wire that the girls that I went against for nationals. And so that was the beginning of it. It was like, "Oh my gosh." And I was so not aerodynamic. I looked like I was holding a beach ball on the bike. It was an aluminum bike that Andy had let me... I mean, it was all kinds of wrong if you saw the pictures from back then. But I had a lot of desire, a lot of heart, a lot of-
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Dotsie Bausch:
Yeah. A lot of lactic acid running through, but...
Rip Esselstyn:
And a lot of plants flowing through your body.
Dotsie Bausch:
Not yet.
Rip Esselstyn:
Not yet. Okay.
Dotsie Bausch:
Not yet. I don't. I know. Not yet. Almost. Very, very close to that unfolding. That unfolded, gosh, about a year and a half later, the realization, and I got the memo like, "Oh, hello."
Rip Esselstyn:
What year did you get the memo?
Dotsie Bausch:
So it was about early 2010.
Rip Esselstyn:
Okay.
Dotsie Bausch:
Yeah. Spring 2010. It was a little over two years before Olympic Games. So yeah. Two years and some months.
Rip Esselstyn:
Right. I definitely want to dive into that, but first, was there much drug use as far as you knew when you were cycling?
Dotsie Bausch:
Well, certainly with men. So men's cycling in Europe... I mean, Europe is where it's a very hot popular sport, right? Not as much here. And so the men are making big bucks. They're able to take care of their whole family for their lifetime if they do it right. So I think you just find when there's a lot of money on the line, you start seeing cheating on the line 'cause you're just trying to get that 1% better. So we knew it was going on in the men.
Dotsie Bausch:
The women were never making that kind of dough to take what I would say would be called all those risks that you take when you blood dope or you use steroids. It was definitely a lot of the Eastern block was getting busted in the women. So yes. But it was never something in the US team that was ever even discussed. I mean, nobody ever approached me to do drugs.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Dotsie Bausch:
Yeah. So, I mean, it was in and around but nothing like as prevalent as it was for the men.
Rip Esselstyn:
So you got the memo in 2000... right? Now, what memo did you get? How did this memo arrive on your desk?
Dotsie Bausch:
The memo arrived in the form of what's going on behind closed doors and animal agriculture and the shock and horror of what... first of all, what is this? This has to be an isolated incident, right? At least in America is very Americana about it. Like our government protects and serves its people over here. And that must include our food sources. This can't be real. This must be going on in some other country. So just there was a curiosity of horror that was born really, where it was just like okay. I was actually at a race in Minnesota, a stage race 'cause I was doing track and road that first year of the track, I was still doing both, and I had taken a position as a mentor on a Kiwi team. And we were to race in Minnesota is where I saw it.
Dotsie Bausch:
And so I saw it and I was like, "Okay, I got to finish this race, but I'm not going to eat any animals until I can get home and prove to myself that this is just an isolated incident or this just goes on very little sometimes." So I didn't eat any meat for the rest of that race, which was, I think we had three, four days to go to the state racing. Like cleaned it out of the refrigerator in our host house. My teammates were like, "Oh my God, what are you doing?" I'm like, "I don't know. I don't know. I have to stop until I can find out the truth." And then went home, went down the rabbit hole and was like, holy mother.
Dotsie Bausch:
So it just was an overnight thing. The eggs and the dairy weren't, but you know, you go down, you're like, "Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God." So that journey took some weeks there for sure. But the meat was overnight and it stayed that way when I went home and did more research. I didn't know anything about... even as an athlete, I mean, this was whatever 12, 13 years ago, and it's shockingly enough even back then, I wasn't hyper focused on my diet for performance, really. Not like we've been talking about the last five years. I mean, of course with plants, it's just a whole nother level, but just even generally speaking.
Dotsie Bausch:
Like always made sure I got my recovery shake in after. I don't even know... I mean, I was using whey protein, all the nasty shit. But I was just eating. I was just eating a lot and good calories, what I thought were good calories at the time. I believed all the myths that we believed as athletes back in the day. And the US Olympic committee was not shy about telling that dairy was really the only way to truly recover as an athlete because that's their title sponsor. So I believed all those myths and I grew up that way. And for 35 years of my life, there was always an animal on my plate at breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Well, and you grew up, as you said in the documentary, in Kentucky where casseroles, barbecue and meat were an everyday occurrence, right?
Dotsie Bausch:
For sure. Yeah. And I mean, also just in the '80s and late '70s, early '80 where it was... I mean, you could look back and it was like boiled hot dogs, kraft macaroni and cheese, iceberg lettuce and ranch dressing. I mean, that was a pretty typical dinner. But mom homemade that. She was a wonderful homemaker and a wonderful mom, and that was pretty good food and healthy. And that's what my taste buds grew up on.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, you bring up a point. It's amazing when I look back on it. And I was always very conscientious about what I was putting in my body as a professional triathlete for decades starting in 1987. But I looked around me and most of these athletes, they didn't care. They just were like, "Hey, if the engine burns hot enough, it doesn't matter what we're throwing in. Just as long as we can get our workouts and we're good."
Dotsie Bausch:
Like it's just fuel. That's it? We're just like... yeah, yeah. Not what type of fuel, just fuel.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, exactly. You're right. It's amazing, I think, how far we've come since 2008, 2009-10, in the last decade. So you're into this and you're just doing it. You reach out for a coach or somebody that knew something about this or you're just figuring it out on your own?
Dotsie Bausch:
I don't know that anyone knew anything about it really. Obviously, I know now that Brendan Brazier was doing some stuff and Robert Cheek and I mean, obviously you were, but I didn't know about you yet. And I didn't know about them. So it was weird where.... and there wasn't Instagram. I mean, I wasn't on it. I wasn't on it till after Olympics. I remember getting. it felt like this strange secret world I was living in. It was just this... and obviously I probably could've sought out further and found people, but I didn't find it all that hard to transition. So I guess, because I wasn't running up against things that were... like a lot of blockades and a lot of things that were... I was feeling great immediately from it.
Dotsie Bausch:
I figured out very quickly that it was more volume because it's not as calorically dense of food. So I wasn't struggling. So that's probably why I wasn't really reaching out for more answers. I've always really liked... I liked bitter and I liked vegetables and I always leaned towards those. So that was lucky 'cause I just liked that food along with bacon and sausage. But I was always eating a lot of the other stuff too, a lot of plant foods. So it just was like, "Oh, okay." So that stuff's going to go out, figured out how to get the macro nutrients in there. Very quickly after that, figured out it's the micronutrients that really matter 'cause that's what was really giving me that energy and that better blood flow and that good cell function and that waking up with energy and the recovery and everything.
Dotsie Bausch:
So now I'm not very nice to people who are transitioning, they're trying to tell me it's hard in 2021. I'm an asshole. I have to get nicer because it's like, what is the problem? Like how are you not diving right into this. So yeah, I'm trying to work on that.
Rip Esselstyn:
There are so many resources that are available now that weren't available a decade ago.
Dotsie Bausch:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
And for all of our listeners, when Dotsie says micronutrients, what she's talking about are the vitamins, the minerals, the phytonutrients, the fiber, and all these things that really don't have calories, but they are essential to taking your health to the next level.
Rip Esselstyn:
We'll return to Dotsie in a moment. But first, I'd love to read an email that I received from a gentleman named Matthew Dowd. And he writes, "Hey, Rip, a routine doctor's appointment in January, 2020 led me to finding out that I had elevated cholesterol numbers. I became familiar with you and your family's work as a long time friend of Jon Stewart. I actually interned at The Daily Show in the summer of 2014. It's still a highlight in my life. My stats since going PLANTSTRONG are as follows. My total cholesterol has dropped 99 points from a high of 227 to 128. My LDL has dropped from a high of 154 to 62. Triglycerides and HDL were both non-issues in previous tests and remained at a healthy level. Just wanted to say thank you. I think I'm slowly influencing some family members to make changes, even if they are small and simple. Matthew Dowd, Kansas city."
Rip Esselstyn:
Way to go Matthew, and I think it was super smart of you to follow the advice of Jon Stewart. And I wish that we had about 300 million more Americans that would do the same thing. But it's emails like these that really get me fired up. And in fact, you know what else gets me fired up? The 10th anniversary of plant stock. This year's event is going to celebrate the dawn of what I like to call the PLANTSTRONG era, because we really are standing on the precipice of a new day at a time when the tipping point for plant-based lifestyles is fast approaching. We are in a zeitgeists.
Rip Esselstyn:
And for the past 10 years, we have been hosting our annual end of the summer event to showcase luminaries, as we call them brock-stars of the movement, this special event is called Plant Stock. And when it began, those of you who have been in our community a long time already know this, it was hosted under a big white tent at the Esselstyn family farm in upstate New York, just a short drive from the original location of Woodstock and hence the name.
Rip Esselstyn:
But since that time, we've hosted nine years of gatherings for people who are either brand new or well-seasoned veterans to the plant-based lifestyle. And we showcase the science, we celebrate the foods that allow us to live our best, most vibrant lives. And we connect with the greater community because community is one of our core values. This year's event will again be virtual, allowing us to reach as many people as possible with the fantastic news about plants. We'll be broadcasting from the farm and spend a weekend learning, laughing, and cooking with all of you. Featured speakers include my family and SE Jane Bryan. We have Dr. Michael Greger, Michael Clapper, Doug Evans the sprout guy, doctors Dean and Ayesha Sherzai, Cyrus Khambatta and Robbie Barbera with mastering diabetes, Dr. Kristi Funk who wrote Breasts: the Owner's Manual. We have T. Colin Campbell and many, many others.
Rip Esselstyn:
So please save the dates, September 8th to September 12th, 2021. And I am so psyched to announce in honor of our 10th anniversary, the first thousand people who register are going to get access to the full event for just $10 in honor of the 10th anniversary. So visit plantstrong.com/plantstocktoday for all the details and to sign up. Now, let's get back to the remarkable Dotsie Bausch.
Rip Esselstyn:
So you mentioned, I think 26 you said, that you were going through some stuff with eating disorder. Is that correct?
Dotsie Bausch:
Yeah. I was very sick from about 20 to 25. So 26 is when I started cycling. 26, I was... I had been working on healing for a good couple of years and was coming out the other end, was coming out healthy, was able to integrate into life again and work and have friends and just be in my body and then be my life. And so my therapist is the one... she said, "You know, I just want you to pick something now to be able to move your body in a healthy way again." I definitely had an addiction to overexercise, which is a part of about 40% of anorexics illness, I should say.
Rip Esselstyn:
What did that overexercising look like then?
Dotsie Bausch:
It was gym stuff for me. I would go to the gym and just camp out for seven, eight hours. And it was the treadmill, it was the elliptical, it was the stairmaster. And I'd just go back and forth with all three of them in different intervals.
Rip Esselstyn:
And how did that begin? Was it a body image thing or what?
Dotsie Bausch:
For me, it began as a way to usurp control over my life. I had graduated college and... It's my dogs, sorry about that.
Rip Esselstyn:
Oh, all right.
Dotsie Bausch:
And I was feeling full of self-loathing. I was feeling very, kind of, fish out of water, very confused about my direction and what I was going to do. And it really started sort of innocently and kind of slowly in the beginning where I just started controlling my food intake because it made me feel powerful, it made me feel like I had control in some way, shape or form. It's hard to control your food, especially the intake, if it's too low. And then I started experiencing a high off of... it's a euphoria when you starve yourself and everyone will tell you that who has few has gone down that.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Dotsie Bausch:
Yeah. I was doing drugs and I got really sick with anorexia and it completely spun out of control, obviously. And I remember feeling... I was living in New York at the time. I had left Philadelphia where I went to college and had moved to New York. And I remember feeling like I wanted to get so small that I would disappear and no one would notice me anymore. It was definitely as the opposite of... some anorexics will say it was trying to be noticed, someone noticing that something's going on with you. And I had like the opposite. Like, I didn't want anyone to see me anymore.
Rip Esselstyn:
How small did you get?
Dotsie Bausch:
Hmm?
Rip Esselstyn:
How small did you get?
Dotsie Bausch:
Under a 100 pounds. I'm 5'9.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Dotsie Bausch:
It got quite ugly. In and out of treatment multiple times. And then when I finally had a reckoning after two suicide attempts of I'm gonna lose my life to this if I don't just at least try to get better. And as any struggling or in the midst of eating disorders, especially anorexia will tell you that there is no part of you that feels like this won't ever not be a part of your life. So you go to treatment or you get a therapist and you go through healing and you truly believe that you will never actually be free of it. That will always be a part of your life, but maybe it could just get a little bit better. And I believe that's how I started, but I believe the exact opposite now.
Dotsie Bausch:
And there're plenty of people that don't think that there's complete recovery, similar to alcoholics, right? You're not ever a 100%. You have to be very present and very aware. Obviously you can't be abstinent because you have to eat. But I can say today, there's never a second of any day that I am obsessed with what is going on my plate or how much I'm exercising or what I'm putting in. It's complete joy, it's complete freedom, it's complete love. And I do feel like I owe that to a plant-based diet. I got a lot better obviously and healed and I was eating animals. But I still didn't have any kind of relationship with fueling myself and how foods made me feel and what it meant to eat certain foods. It was just more mechanical. My husband and I would go out to eat six nights a week. It was just like, yeah, just food, whatever.
Dotsie Bausch:
And now, it's just a whole experience of freedom and fulfillment and joy, and it's really cool. So it's definitely the exact opposite of where I was before.
Rip Esselstyn:
Wow. Well, thanks for sharing that. Were you dating at all during that dark period?
Dotsie Bausch:
No.
Rip Esselstyn:
No.
Dotsie Bausch:
No. No. When I was sick, I wasn't... I had pretty bad foggy brain, which anorexics will speak about. I was down to like 175 calories a day. I got it down to that. Some get it down to zero. And your brain doesn't have the nutrients that it needs. We know our brain runs off glycogen. It takes 25% of our body's energy to run. So it wasn't functioning. I remember just being in my house, I couldn't work. I didn't have a life. I didn't have friends. I didn't have a boyfriend. And I remember being like, "All right, you have to somehow grow in some way. So try and read." And I couldn't even really read. I would read the same page over and over and over again, trying to get it to come in and remember what it was. Yeah. It was a bad time.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. I mean, did somebody on your behalf say, "Dotsie, you need to get help?" Or was it...
Dotsie Bausch:
Oh, yeah. Everyone. I mean, I was like the walking dead. And my family was, especially my mom and dad, it was terrorizing them. But I was 20, 21, 22. So there wasn't really anything they could do. I mean, I was living alone and I was an adult. So they didn't really have any control over than if you would have like a 15 year old, that was going through something like this. So my mom tried some interventions in Philadelphia. She flew in and I took her. She came in for an intervention. It didn't go well. She was not scheduled to leave until a few days later, but I drove her to the Philadelphia airport and tossed out my 110 pound mother onto the sidewalk. And she bloodied her knee and her eyebrow.
Dotsie Bausch:
I mean, that was one of the lowest points for me 'cause I assaulted my mother on the sidewalk of the Philadelphia airport and drove off. That's how against getting better I was at the time.
Rip Esselstyn:
Were your mother and father in that one scene in The Game Changers where after you win the silver medal, you go up and hug? Was that your mother or your friend or...
Dotsie Bausch:
Yeah. That's mom and dad. Yeah. Well, my husband. I mean, I think it's like a big thing, that over the wall kissing scene, 'cause for whatever freaking reason, we couldn't get to them. It was like, "Why are we trapped in the outside of the velodrome where we can't see our families after it was over?"
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, I mean, as parents, I can't... Wow. I mean, what a turnaround. How amazing, all those tears of joy. Right? Wow.
Dotsie Bausch:
They definitely had a lot. Yeah. Yeah. When you're living it, for me, it wasn't... I knew that it was an extraordinary journey to see my body transform. Right? It taught me, God, our bodies are resilient. I mean, to go from almost death's door to an Olympic medal, it's a... and when I mentor young ladies, 'cause they're mostly ladies that are young, through their eating disorder, you don't have any hope. And the one thing that I can say is if you can get on top of this and if you can do the work and if you want to do the work, you will completely repair. Right? Our bodies are extraordinary. I mean, they're set up for survival.
Dotsie Bausch:
So that was amazing to me. But the emotional and the mental aspect of it, I think I could see that joy, like you mentioned, more in the eyes of my parents, 'cause they... when somebody you love is hurting, it's so much more intense than when you're hurting. I didn't have as many memories of that Dotsie as they did. So it was really special to see them be able to experience that with the Olympics.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. That's just such a... You dragged yourself up from the ashes. That's spectacular. And there was a documentary that was done, I haven't seen it, called Personal Gold, right?
Dotsie Bausch:
Yes. Yeah. That's where all the footage comes from in Game Changers.
Rip Esselstyn:
Okay.
Dotsie Bausch:
Because they followed our team all of the last three months. So we all lived in Spain together in Majorca, Spain, training and preparing for London for some of the obvious reasons of why we would want to be over in Europe and not have a time difference when we went to Wednesday Olympics, but just great training grounds, great road cycling, great track cycling there. So they followed our team for those three months. So that's... yeah. It's not as good as the game changers, but it's good.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Dotsie Bausch:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
Gold, does that go in into any of your history at all?
Dotsie Bausch:
Yeah. A little bit. Yeah. It goes into the three girls history. We all have pretty unique paths actually. So yeah, it does a little bit.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Are you still pretty close with those teammates that you won the silver with?
Dotsie Bausch:
Very. Yeah. I just talked to Jenny two nights ago. It was her birthday.
Rip Esselstyn:
Wow.
Dotsie Bausch:
It's a magical bond that I don't have any other relationships exactly like that. You know how you have really unique relationships that there's something... there's something that happened on the track in that semi-final ride that we would never have been able to... we'd never gone that fast before, and I don't think it was going to ever be repeatable again. It was like that moment in time that it's stood still and it just happened in the right ride and the right moment at the Olympics on that day, which is the whole craziness of the Olympics, trying to hit it right on that one minute in that one day on that one stage. And you know...
Rip Esselstyn:
So I have never won a medal in the Olympics, but my father won a gold medal in 1956in Crew. And I've heard him tell the story how they had to come back in the repertoires and win that heat and then go into the finals where they were really the underdogs. Right?
Dotsie Bausch:
Yes.
Rip Esselstyn:
And they pulled it out. And him telling that story... would you share with us, as much or as little as you want about that experience going in as the underdogs and then you guys actually winning the silver. That's quite a story.
Dotsie Bausch:
Crew is somewhat similar to cycling in terms of like, it's like the big European teams that are the demigods of the sport, right? It's Great Britain and Germany and Australia and New Zealand and they're just wild for track cycling. The British won the gold and those girls are recognized on the street over there. Like it's a whole other stratosphere. It's like our baseball, you know? So to say that we were the underdogs, it's even just a wild understatement. I mean, the bookies had us fifth at best case scenario in London. Really we had never beaten their eighteens. We'd never beaten Great Britain's 18 or Australia's 18 ever, in world championships, world cups, nothing.
Dotsie Bausch:
So we were definite underdogs. But we came to the Olympics by two teammates, Sarah and Jenny. Sarah had been to two Olympic games and Jenny had been to one. So they did a great job in preparing me for just the mental and emotional experience that in Olympics Games is. And I knew it was going to be intense. I had trained my mind with my sports psychologist for a couple of years. We worked really, really hard on basically just the concept of bringing down the magnitude of the event, 'cause that I think is what trips up the multi-time world champion, they get to Olympic Games and it really is as big of a magnitude as you imagine it might be. It's like, holy... I mean it's, we are here.
Dotsie Bausch:
So just bringing it down and remembering that you are going to do exactly what you've been trained to do for years. It's not going to be a surprise, you're not going to get up to the blocks and they say, "Hey, you know what, you're going to compete in gymnastics today. So let's take you..." No. You're going to do what you know how to do, what you've been trained to do, what you've been processing, what you've been working on. So it was a really good head-space going there and was able to really soak up that Olympic experience, 'cause I was just a few months shy of my 40th. So I knew I wasn't gonna be back probably. I knew that this was it. So I really wanted to be there and be in my body.
Rip Esselstyn:
I want you to continue. But before you do, you said you were a few months shy of your 40th birthday. And I think I heard in the documentary, that made you the oldest male or female cyclist to win a medal. Is that right?
Dotsie Bausch:
To even compete and my discipline. And people are starting to get the memo and they're going to eat plants and someone's going to stand there 50 years old and 10 years right on the medal stand 'cause they're on a plant-based diet. The British team just took on their first plant-based sponsor. It's kind of like the guardian type of a sponsor over there. Anyway. But...
Rip Esselstyn:
You were in the right mental space.
Dotsie Bausch:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was three rides to the gold medal. It's three rides. So you have qualifying the first day, and then you have semi's and the finals if you make it the next day. Qualifying, we ended up qualifying second to the Brits, and it was tightly packed, the four countries under the British, by just marginal tenths of a second.
Rip Esselstyn:
So, did you think you'd qualified second or was that like, "Wow. That was amazing."
Dotsie Bausch:
No. I mean, the dream is to qualify second or third. Because in semi's, first rides against fourth, second rides against third, fifth rides against eight, six rides against seventh. So the dream is to qualify second or third or first. Yeah. But then you're going to ride against somebody that's more closely matched.
Rip Esselstyn:
Is it the time? Is it the time then as opposed to...
Dotsie Bausch:
So the qualifying is all based on time. And then you're seated. And then the next is, no, it's beating the other team. And that's where the beauty of team pursuit comes in because you're literally in pursuit of the other team on the track. So then you're just riding head-to-head. So the next day was the semifinal ride. Australia qualified third, we wrote against Australia. Young talented team. These ladies are 21, 22, 23, literally born and bred for this. They were selected out of their schools at five to go through the Australian Institute of Sport and become these stars. And I think the fact that our team was older... I mean, I was definitely the oldest, but Sarah is 10 years younger than I am, and Jenny six. So we were older than they were.
Dotsie Bausch:
And I think we just had just a little bit more of an awareness, a little bit more confidence, a little bit more of a calm about that semifinal ride. Like just we knew what we had to bring and it was big and it was going to be something that we had never produced before ever. But we just rode smarter. They came out super hot. And if you come out super hot in team pursuit, as some people know our bikes are fixies, there's no brakes and it's one gear. So in order to get up to speed in that gear, it's a massive lift off of the blocks, 800, 900 watts to even get off the blocks. And then you're already big-ass gear. We rode a 102 inch gears for the track techies out there at the Olympics. They're riding like 106 inch gears now.
Dotsie Bausch:
And so if you go out too hot, you can't shift later. On the road, you're just trapped on for years. You shift, you flush it out, come back on top of the gear. You can't do that. So you are just eft if you go out too hot. That's all there is to it. And that's what the Aussies did. I think they came out too hot for a couple of reasons. One could potentially have been a little bit of nerves, but two, I think they were trying to put us in the hot seat, and put us on the defensive. And it worked because we were down 1.6 seconds with about four laps to go. No one's ever come back in Olympic history in team pursuit from that deficit ever. It's forever. It's almost two seconds. It's a really long time.
Rip Esselstyn:
Unheard of.
Dotsie Bausch:
It's totally unheard of. And really it's a lot of time. But we beat the Aussies on the line by eight 100th of a second the chase in the gold medal. It was close. It was very tight. It's a great video. It looks obviously like we crossed the line at the same time. But we crossed it that much faster.
Rip Esselstyn:
Anybody who wants to see it, go to The Game Changers on Netflix for sure.
Dotsie Bausch:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
Okay. So you got the silver. And were you guys just like holy...
Dotsie Bausch:
Yes. Yeah, for sure. It was like, what the fuck just happened. I mean, that was the Sydney's right. So then we went to the gold medal match and we lost. Right? We lost to the Brit. So they've always said that the saddest people at the Olympics are the silver medalist because you lost your final, whereas the bronze medalist won their final. Right?
Rip Esselstyn:
Right.
Dotsie Bausch:
But it was a whole another story for us. I remember being on a high for just many, many, many days and weeks. I mean, it was something that we'd never produced before. And like I said, I don't think we would have ever again. And we knew that. We knew what we brought that day. And it was the very best that we had. And when you just deliver your very best, at the end, it just doesn't super matter what color the metal is or if there's even a medal, right? We laid down something completely unprecedented from the American team. So yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, you need be at the right time and the right place. And in exchange, you got a silver medal. How do you feel like that medal has changed your life?
Dotsie Bausch:
Well, I'm really most grateful for it to be able to save lives, right? Now we're in a space where it's actually intriguing to people to hear about athletes eating plants, you know? So really now, I find it to be... I mean, obviously it was an extraordinary personal experience that I'm proud of, but the Olympics also come and go, and now it's history. Like your dad knows it's a lot of way history and life goes on. So now, it's just this, I look at the medal and it's just like this enormous vehicle to save lives, 'cause I feel like that's why I was put on planet earth, and I didn't recognize that til maybe age 40 really, that that's what I was going to spend the rest of my life doing. So that's what it means to be now.
Rip Esselstyn:
So you are now saving lives. In fact in 2018, VegNews named you one of the top 20 most influential vegans on the planet. That's freaking amazing.
Dotsie Bausch:
[Laughter] Whatever that means
Rip Esselstyn:
Hey, we'll take it. We'll take it. You have the Switch4Good nonprofit that you started. You also have the podcast. Tell me about the nonprofit and what that's about.
Dotsie Bausch:
Yeah. Well, the origin story of the nonprofit was not to build a nonprofit at all. It was to go up against the long standing belief that athletes need cow's milk to repair and recover after having lived through so much inundation of cows milk at the training centers where I trained for years, and this bizarre belief that I held to myself until the last couple of years when I, like we talked about, got the memo. I was like, "What is going on?"
Dotsie Bausch:
So in 2018, got together, I just had this idea. We all know the milk commercials, and then they go crazy during the Olympics because it's the Olympic committee's title sponsor. And so I was watching Olympic trials in 2018 and was seeing a lot of milk commercials. And I just had this moment, on the couch by myself, like somebody needs to do something about this. Like, how long are we going to let this lie live? I mean, when are we going to say, "What the hell?" And then I kind of thought, "Well, I guess I could say something, 'cause doesn't seem like it is specifically is about this one problem."
Dotsie Bausch:
So got together some funders and Louie directed the commercial one day in Los Angeles and we put this commercial with six, seven vegan Olympians saying, "Hey, we don't need cow's milk to win medals." They were from four different countries. So really diverse crew of Olympians. And it ran on the closing ceremonies in Washington DC, and then the dairy industry kicked it off. So it didn't run in the rest of the five markets that it was supposed to run.
Rip Esselstyn:
So they're able to kick it off. They have that kind of power, huh.
Dotsie Bausch:
Power of the money, right? So they advertise with NBC more than we do, which was never until this moment. And so, we'll never know the true story, but yeah. Either the USFC or the dairy industry called NBC and said shut this down. We did get our money back. We ran it the next week on ABC, pre and post Oscars, but not the effect. Anyways. So that was our origin story. And we realized shortly thereafter that there's just something here, there's something here that no one was specifically doing in the movement and being talking about performance and animal foods, and especially the myth of dairy as it relates to food justice, as it relates to planetary responsibility, and as it relates to premium human performance, not just athletic performance, just all of us being our best every day. And so the nonprofit got off the ground.
Dotsie Bausch:
So we do a lot of behavior change work. But mostly, we're focused in the areas of research and changing laws. And so we were able to make big changes the new dietary guidelines that came out at the end of last year to get soy milk nutritionally equivalent to cows milk in schools for children. And now we'll be pushing for the actual milk note to be changed, to include soy milk and soy milk available for children in school. So things like that around dairy. They have a big lobby and a whole lot of money, but it needs to be worked on.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Are you the executive director?
Dotsie Bausch:
Yes.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Yeah. Wonderful. And I love the name Switch4Good.
Dotsie Bausch:
Thanks.
Rip Esselstyn:
I love the double entendre and good. Switch for good meaning forever or switch for good because it's a good thing, right?
Dotsie Bausch:
Yeah. Thanks.
Rip Esselstyn:
It's good. It's good. And then you also have the Switch4Good podcast. You and Alexandra Paul, how long have you had that going?
Dotsie Bausch:
Just two years. I think it's just a little over two years. Yeah. Yeah. 'Cause she's just an extraordinary human. You guys are amazing that do it by yourself, but I don't think I'd want to. I love having my buddy. We just back and forth ideas for the show and then with the guests and yeah. Just lot of things.
Rip Esselstyn:
No, there's lots of time when it's very lonely, just being a one person show. And it'd be nice to have compadre there so you can take a break.
Dotsie Bausch:
Yeah. No. Right. Yeah. Yeah. She thinks of things that I'm not thinking of to traverse or ask. Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. So tell me this, you and I both love our troughs. I mean, I've actually got commercialized Rip's Big Bowl Cereal. That's my trough.
Dotsie Bausch:
Right.
Rip Esselstyn:
When you refer to your trough, is that a breakfast, a lunch, a dinner, or what is that?
Dotsie Bausch:
I would say it's mostly lunch or dinner. 'Cause I've never been that into food until I switched over to plants and just found the whole world very intriguing and all new tantalizing flavors. But still nonetheless, there's still the athlete in me that if I can't make something in 15 minutes, I'm just annoyed. Like I won't spend an hour in the kitchen making dinner. It's just not happening. So these layered truffles work for the taste buds and for the satiety and the volume to have you be healthy and full. So usually they're layers, and I work them in what my husband and I are in the mood for, kind of ethnicities like you do when you go out, do we feel like Thai? Do we feel like Japanese? Do we feel like Italian? That's what we do. And then we just, boom, boom, boom. And it's like greens, greens, nuts, seeds, beans, whatever it's going to be.
Dotsie Bausch:
And Italian night always has the Field Roast sausages on it. We do do burger night. That is not a truffle. That's probably the only thing that's not layered. But yeah, it's just an easy, fun, satiating way to eat, I find.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. No. When I wrote my third book called The Engine 2 Seven-Day Rescue Diet, the recipe section was all about building bowls. That's all it was. Just bowls. No recipe, bowl building. And it's such a great, easy way to eat, especially like you said, if you're kind if in a hurry, you don't want to spend an hour in the kitchen, but 15 minutes, and the variety is just limitless.
Dotsie Bausch:
Yeah. I feel like it is too. Yeah. You almost can try something new, a little bit new almost every time. Oh, why don't we throw this in there? This seed or this spice. Yeah. That's cool.
Rip Esselstyn:
What are you doing these days for training, staying in shape? Are you still into the bike?
Dotsie Bausch:
Yeah, well, not the track, 'cause I don't like to, or nor do I have the time to drive to ride 'cause the tracks up in Carson, they're indoor track. But I'm really into mountain biking. I just find it so freeing and there's no cars and it's very challenging and obviously my legs go round in circles well, so it's kind of like, I'm good at it, but I'm not as good at the technical parts. And I just feel like I love seeing how I can improve in those areas. And I can be found doing a spin class a couple of times a week, which is just... I just love that 50 minutes pounded out, my body does it well, and I just get a great sweat.
Rip Esselstyn:
I love in The Game Changers when you were referring to how you didn't know if you were going to survive and you started eating this way and you became a machine.
Dotsie Bausch:
Yeah, it's crazy. Isn't it? I still feel that way to some dumb, not nearly as fit. But I think it's a bit odd, I'm at 48 now, and a lot of people my age don't necessarily feel that great. And I literally feel absolutely freaking amazing every day. I'm starting to be aware that that's going to be more and more rare. Right? As people get into their '50s and it's like a lot of people have a lot of complaints about a lot of things going on in their body and it's like, yeah, I think it's the plants.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. You mentioned mountain biking. I've been doing that avidly since about 1997. I started doing Xterra .
Dotsie Bausch:
Wow. Okay.
Rip Esselstyn:
...Xterra Triathlons...And actually, as soon as we get off here, I'm going to go for a mountain bike. But what I love so much about mountain biking... and you mentioned the skills, but when you're mountain biking on those little single track trails and going up and down and over the roots and the rocks, and when everything is... you gotta be a 100% dialed in.
Dotsie Bausch:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
So you can't be off daydreaming about, "Ah, what's the project I gotta do. I gotta do this. I got..." So to me, it's such a great way to just focus on what I'm doing singularly and not be worried about anything.
Dotsie Bausch:
Yeah. I know I love that about it too, 'cause it's going to be gnarly on the mountain back if you crash. For sure, you're going to do some damage. So I find that too. It makes me hyper-focused and I don't... all the stuff just leaves, right? Your processing just dissipates and you're just there. You're just present. It's hard to be present these days. Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, Dotsie, this has been an absolute pleasure, I can't even tell you. You know our mutual friend Gene Stone mentioned you. She met you at a book club and was mentioning how wonderful you were. And I'm like, "Oh my God, I totally need to get Dotsie on the podcast." And I'm so glad that we made it happen. You are-
Dotsie Bausch:
Me too.
Rip Esselstyn:
... such a pioneer and so courageous, and your story of coming just back from the ashes to a silver medal and a life where you are making such incredible... you're saving so many lives across a broad spectrum. Human lives, animal lives, planetary lives.
Dotsie Bausch:
Thanks Rip.
Rip Esselstyn:
I want to thank you for that. And I want to say how much I look forward to meeting you the next time when I'm in LA.
Dotsie Bausch:
Awesome
Rip Esselstyn:
Peace, engine two.
Dotsie Bausch:
Yup.
Rip Esselstyn:
You got PLANTSTRONG.
Dotsie Bausch:
Cool. I like it.
Rip Esselstyn:
Okay. Thank you Dotsie and your team at Switch4Good. Love all the great work that you're doing. It is most definitely time to ditch the dairy and experience all the benefits that you're going to gain by doing so. You may not win an Olympic medal, but your body will think you can. And that is what it's all about. Feeling like a champ. Okay everybody, have a wonderful and safe weekend. And if you're here in the United States, happy 4th of July and enjoy a PLANTSTRONG picnic. If you need some ideas for a summer grilling guide, you can grab our free summer grilling guide at the link on the episode page at plantstrongpodcast.com. Peace, Engine 2, keep it PLANTSTRONG.
Rip Esselstyn:
Thank you for listening to the PLANTSTRONG podcast. You can support the show by taking a quick minute to follow us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Leaving us a positive review and sharing the show with your network is another great way to help us reach as many people as possible with the exciting news about plants. Thank you in advance for your support. It means everything.
Rip Esselstyn:
Have you had your own Galileo moment that you'd like to share? What happened when you stepped into the arena and shed the beliefs that you thought to be true? I'd love to hear about it. Visit plantstrongpodcast.com to submit your story and to learn more about today's guests and sponsors.
Rip Esselstyn:
The PLANTSTRONG podcast team includes Carrie Barrett, Laurie Kortowich, Ami Mackey, Patrick Gavin and Wade Clark. This season is dedicated to all of those courageous true seekers, who weren't afraid to look through the lens with clear vision and hold firm to a higher truth. Most notably, my parents, Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr. and Ann Crile Esselstyn. Thanks for listening.
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