My husband, my father, and two of my brothers have all had the surgery. As tygab said, it is not surgery to be taken lightly ... before my husband had his, I knew exactly what he was in for because I was still living at home when my dad had the surgery, but my husband's doctors really were not upfront about the amount of pain he'd have, or about how uncomfortable physical therapy would be. I think he would have been better off if he'd understood upfront what he was getting into. (He only arranged to take two days off work, for instance. He needed a month.)

That said, cycling is totally in your future. In fact my husband is a cycling nut now because of his ACL injury. He can't ski, run, or rock climb anymore, not so much because of the original injury but because of a later rock-climbing fall that involved a broken bone at the ACL repair site, and new damage to the replaced ACL -- this is an injury you really can't keep repairing over and over; at some point they can't keep grafting new ligaments to the same piece of bone.

But he can still ride, with very little knee trouble except for some difficulties with certain types of clipless pedals. (The much-lauded Speedplays don't work at all for him, for instance.)

So my advice is to give yourself plenty of time to recover from surgery and make sure your house is well set-up to let you do it. (This is a bad time to get a new lab puppy! That made for some painful collisions since the dog was just knee-height.) Do your physical therapy but if the pain continues or gets worse, follow through. (My husband needed minor arthroscopic surgery to clean up some scar tissue, and he put it off for ages because he was afraid it would be as bad as the original surgery, but it was a relative breeze and really increased his mobility dramatically.) Once it's healed, don't fall on it. And be nice to the person who takes care of you during your recovery ... when you take Vicodin for that long it makes you kind of mean and crabby, so be sure to tell that person before the surgery and after your recovery that you appreciate them.

(We nearly split up after every single surgery, and my mom and dad nearly got divorced after his surgery.)