Paralympic Swimmer Ali Truwit Is Training for the New York Marathon for a Great Cause

The 2025 SI Swimsuit model will run the November race alongside family and friends.

Paralympic swimmer and 2025 SI Swimsuit model Ali Truwit is currently training to run the New York City Marathon in early November. In this exclusive video, the 25-year-old athlete discusses the challenges of training on a prosthetic, her nonprofit, Stronger Than You Think, and more. Donate to the cause here.

TRANSCRIPT

 Ten days before the shark attack, I ran a marathon with my mom on Mother’s Day in Copenhagen. And now just over two years out from the attack, we’re gonna run our second marathon together in New York in November.

For me, learning the nuances on a prosthetic blade has been pretty tricky. For like cracks in the road, I don’t have a foot that can feel them, so I have to like constantly keep my eyes up and then my blade is adjusted to my hip height. And so if the road slopes like this, the alignment is off because one leg’s higher. So learning how to navigate stuff like that or hills without an ankle.

It is easy to get frustrated, learning how to run with a new body, so the mental side of that is obviously what keeps me going and getting up and trying again. When the marathon happens, I will have had my prosthetic leg for about a year, which is a pretty quick turnaround, but I’m a big proponent of like, why not now? If I feel ready and I feel like I wanna try, and for me, I’m really excited to continue showing the world what people with disabilities are capable of.

And I also started my own nonprofit, Stronger Than You Think, and so I’m really driven to continue fundraising for that through this marathon so that we can give more young women and girls prosthetic blades so that they can run too.

So I recently started doing a lot more strength training. Um, it is a lot on my right leg to kind of carry any of the pressure from that left leg. And then it’s a lot on my left leg to have the strength to move the blade for that long.

I have learned to really prioritize recovery and make sure that I’m on top of that. And so I do a lot of like acupuncture, dry needling, physical therapy to keep myself as uninjured as possible. So most of it I can mitigate with some of that stuff.

Usually Monday I am doing strength work. And then Tuesday I do a longer workout with hills, um, either on the treadmill or I think we’re gonna build to outside soon, because that’s something that I really had to learn how to do on the blade. And then Wednesday is a shorter run, um, that’s a little bit more relaxed.

Same with Thursday. Um, we’re just actually now switching to Thursdays completely off. And then Friday we do the shorter run. Saturday’s the big long run. So the longest I’ve done so far is 18, but I have a 20 this weekend and then I’ll build the 22. Um, and then Sunday’s kind of a shorter shakeout run again, like four miles or so.

I think my advice is that you’re stronger than you think. It’s a big reason that I named my nonprofit Stronger Than You Think, to spread that message of hope and encouragement. I just truly believe that we are all sitting on wells of capacity that we don’t know we have within us and if we can open our minds to it, we will surprise ourselves. So I would tell them they’re stronger than they think, and it’s normal to feel nervous or scared, but they can do it. Um, and thinking back, you know, to my own personal journey, I had a million fears and worries and I can’ts and I’ll never, you know, I said I would never show my prosthetic leg, and here I am with SI Swimsuit modeling in, you know, a tiny bikini in my prosthetic leg. So it’s normal to feel like you can’t, or you’ll never, but the message that I come away with is you can, and you will.

I’m running with my mom and my dad, and then Sophie and Hannah. Sophie was in the water with me during the attack and applied the tourniquet to save my life. And then Hannah was in the trauma hospital that I was airlifted to to have lifesaving surgery, and both of them were my college teammates and best friends, and they’re running it too. So I’m super, super excited about that and just to be able to run alongside so many people who were so pivotal in, you know, my journey and my comeback.

I don’t have a time goal just because I feel like it’s gonna be an incredible feat to just finish a marathon on a blade two years out from a shark attack. Um, but I do have a fundraising goal. I wanna raise $100,000 so that we can give more young women and girls prosthetic blades to run so that maybe someday they could run a marathon too. And it really, that “why” really keeps me going because there are hard parts of the training cycle or things that feel frustrating and even in mile 20 of the marathon, I know who I’m thinking of and it’s those young girls that we can give blades to.