Back in the Water: Ali Truwit on Recovery, the Olympics, and the call from Tom Cruise.

23 December 2024

Ali Truwit is careful about how she tells the hard part, because she lived through all of it. A shark attack soon after graduating from Yale, lifesaving surgery, and an amputation on her 23rd birthday. She states it plainly and moves on, because the story she wants to tell is what she chose to do next. In the hospital, amid genuinely dark days, she set herself on gratitude for being alive and on the parts of her old life she could still fight for. Chief among them was the water. She had grown up a swimmer, and her most recent memory of it was fighting to survive; she wanted that relationship back.

What began as a quest to love the water again and to get some cardio became a decision to delay her post-graduate job and try to make the Paralympics, with trials barely a year after the amputation. She is clear-eyed that it was an absurd turnaround. She is just as clear that it was the most healing thing she could have done.

One of her surgeons gave her some advice that she still turns over. Chasing the Games, he told her, meant choosing to live a little more in her disability every day, taking the leg off to get in the pool and training in full view of what she had lost, where a desk job would have let her put the leg on and get on with the day. She was grateful he made her think it through, and she went anyway. To qualify in her classification, she had to swim times close to what she had needed, with two feet, to be recruited to swim at Yale; now she had to do it with one.

She credits the people around her without cliché, because she means it. Her mother gave her a framing she repeats: if you are going to ask why me about the attack, ask why me about the support too, the family, the coaches, the doctors who were there at every corner. A year on from learning to take her first steps on a prosthetic, she was taking her first steps down the Champs-Élysées at the opening ceremony, and racing in front of full arenas to two silver medals, in the 400m freestyle and the 100m backstroke.

She has turned the hardest thing into the thing she leads with. Her story, she says, does not make sense to her, but helping other people does, and that is where the meaning has come from. She started Truwit Treats, a baking business born in recovery because the kitchen was the one place her mind could rest, and then a foundation, Stronger Than You Think, built on what she calls the three pillars that saved her: water safety, para activities, and providing prosthetic limbs to people who cannot afford them. She has poured medal money and speaking fees into it, and it was set to fund its first prosthetic leg.

Her message to anyone in a dark place is the foundation's name. You are stronger than you think, with more in you to give and to bounce back than you believe. She never expected her loss to become something that helps others, the messages from mothers and strangers, the advocacy, the place on the biggest stage. That, she says, is a privilege she will not take for granted, and she intends to use every avenue available to her.