Disheartened athlete looking for motivation

Where to begin. I've spent the last hour reading other people's posts, encouragement, challenges, and success stories, and am hoping to make my own. I am currently a sophomore in college, and my weight/fitness level is extremely important to me. I was always active and healthy growing up, and started competing in track when I was thirteen. My sophomore year of high school is when I first remember noticing how I looked and counting calories. It wasn't long until I knew the fat, sat fat, carbs, fiber, protein, and calories of everything I ate. I actually was not trying to lose weight though, just make sure that I was healthy overall. When I had my annual check-up that year, I was 5'8'' and weighed around 125. I didn't own a scale, and wasn't concerned with the numerical weight until my doctor told me that I should gain weight. For the rest of high school I struggled with body image issues and obsessively counted calories, but continued to succeeded in track and was a two time all American by graduation. I had gained about ten pounds since sophomore year, but it was primarily in muscle which didn't phase me seeing as I didn't own a scale.

I started college, and although the transition was rough (as I'm sure it is for most people) I was soon back to running forty miles a week and happy with where I was. Although I was not competing for my school, I had been running road races in central park and enjoying the challenge of essentially coaching myself. Then, the week before I was supposed to compete in my first half-marathon, I didn't fully pivot on a step in dance class, dislocated my knee cap, tore my meniscus, and tore the cartilage behind my knee cap. Go figure that it was the last day of class, and the final step of that dance. I was on crutches for the first time in my life, and once the doctors saw my MRI results I was scheduled for arthroscopic surgery to remove the torn/floating cartilage and tidy the meniscus tear. In early May I had the procedure done, and was looking forward to a speedy recovery and return to running.

As the summer progressed, however, I continued to have pain under my knee cap, and finally returned to my orthopedic surgeon. He took another MRI of my knee, which showed that because my knee cap was so loose (a combination of genetics and the effects of dislocating it in April) that it was tracking poorly, and continuing to sand-paper away at the area where the cartilage had been torn. I knew in the bottom of my heart that I was going to need another surgery; the question was which kind. I could have another arthroscopic surgery to tighten up my knee cap, or could have open knee surgery to place embryonic cartilage cells behind my knee cap, in the damaged area. I did, and will always, trust my doctor, and so we decided to attempt arthroscopic surgery, with my go ahead to open up my knee in the operating room if the cartilage was too badly damaged to leave alone. However, the fall semester of college had started, and because I'm a theater major in an extremely active program I had to wait until winter break to have my surgery. My knee was stable enough to maintain until then, but not enough to run, and waiting for the surgery depressed me; I began to slowly put on weight--one of my biggest fears--as running was pushed off another four months.

Two days before Christmas of 2010 I had open knee surgery. It went well; my knee cap was tightened and new cartilage cells placed, but open knee surgery meant months of recovery. I spent two months in a full leg brace, relatively inactive for the first, and fighting to keep up in theater school the second. I've now been in a smaller knee brace for a few weeks, doing physical therapy twice a week, and am just starting to use the stationary bike. I have completely lost motivation though, after almost a year of coping with this injury. I have fallen victim of depressive binge eating (combated with hardly eating regular food on those days) and often do not feel like doing anything. I find myself regretting that one misstep I took over and over, thinking off all the things I could have done to avoid it, and asking myself how I went from a confident, health, happy athlete to the person I see in the mirror today: twenty pounds heavier, sad, unmotivated.

Well, that changes today. I could spend my entire life regretting that moment in dance class, but the truth of the situation is that I could have dislocated my knee cap at any point in my life, and so at least I did it at an age where recovery is much easier. I will be twenty in a little over a month, and I don't want to leave my teenage years thinking that I'm ugly, or a failure, or full of regret. I don't want to need to look in the mirror to be happy, and I want to run that half-marathon. I am currently 5'9'' and around 150 lbs, and my goal is to lose about twenty over the next couple of months. As always, taking the first step is the hardest thing though, and so if anyone is going through something similar and has any advice or would like to work together, that would be fantastic. I hope to return to running soon, and then be able to inspire people who experience what I've been through. Thank you for sticking with me through this super long post!!

-Catie