Paralympian Ali Truwit Training for Marathon After Shark Attack (Exclusive)

Ali Truwit is competitive by nature. She’s a lifelong athlete with a proven track record on both land and sea. Truwit completed the 2023 Copenhagen Marathon just before finishing Yale University, where she enjoyed a successful career on the school’s swimming and diving teams.

Her inner drive — that competitive streak which fuels her wins — remained revved as ever once she earned a bachelor’s degree, though she was keen to unwind on a tropical getaway to celebrate her graduation. Truwitt was accompanied by her best friend, fellow former Yale swimmer Sophie Pilkinton, who had her own big win to celebrate after finishing medical school.

“I flew to Turks and Caicos with a five-year plan for myself. I was going to go work in consulting for two years,” Truwit, now 25, recalls to PEOPLE over two years later. “Then I was going to hopefully go to business school and then after that, enter the healthcare space.”

In a shallow reef known to be a common tourist snorkeling spot, Truwit’s plan unraveled. She tells PEOPLE that the shark seemed to appear “out of nowhere” when it started to attack her and Pilkinton simultaneously.

“We kicked and punched and fought back, but pretty quickly it got my leg in its mouth,” Truwit remembers. “The next thing I knew, it had bitten off my foot and part of my leg. We screamed for help, but no help came.”

In a split second, they decided to swim back to their boat, which was roughly 75 yards away from them in the open ocean. Once aboard, Pilkinton asked the captain for a tourniquet to secure around Truwit’s leg in an effort to stop the bleeding.

Looking back, Truwit feels an immense sense of gratitude that she was with a recent medical school graduate. But more than anything else, Truwit applauds her friend’s character and selflessness. Pilkinton was also a victim of the same incident that she prevented from killing her best friend.

“Yes, it was incredibly lucky that she had just graduated [from] medical school and that she had the knowledge and the skill to apply a tourniquet and to know that it needed to be tightened and to know what to do in that situation,” says Truwit. “But you can also be someone who knows those things and not act that way when you too have been attacked by a shark.”

She continues of Pilkinton, “I think of it as an incredible fortune that … she’s the type of person that she is — a selfless, composed, clutch person who acts that way in the face of measurable trauma.”

Eventually, medical help reached their boat, and Truwit has since told the story of her fated interaction with one of the first responders, Matthew. In that moment, Truwit had no way of knowing that one year later, she would become a two-time silver medalist at the 2024 Summer Paralympics. All she knew was the attack that put her in the position to be lying on the floor of a boat looking up at Matthew.

As Truwit later recounted in a social media post from August 2025, she told him, “Well, at least I got my marathon in before this.” Matthew replied without missing a beat, “You’ll run another one.”

Shortly after the shark attack, Truwit underwent an above-knee amputation at a hospital in New York City. By then, her name was already in headlines. Truwit realized she was no longer just an Ivy League graduate with a consulting career ahead of her. She was a survivor, a 22-year-old amputee, the subject of global news.

Becoming a public figure was intimidating at first, but Truwit turned her stage into an opportunity to recognize the heroes of her story, “people who rose up, who saved my life, who helped me rebuild it,” she explains. “Whether that’s Matthew the first responder, Sophie on the boat, my doctors, prosthetists, surgeons or my mom.”

Truwit came to terms with the fact that she no longer fit into her original five-year plan. She didn’t scrap those goals altogether, since she may return to that type of career eventually, but she mapped out something new.

But while she left her post-grad plan in Turks and Caicos, she came home with her competitive nature still intact. In the blur that took so much away, she prevailed with the same drive and will to succeed, and those parts of her have since flourished even further.

“I have come away with the takeaway that we are all so much stronger than we think, that we have so much more in us than we think we do,” Truwit tells PEOPLE. “It can feel scary and overwhelming, but when our mind tells us we have nothing left, we still have more.”

Truwit remains a competitor. What changed was who and what she is competing against, and cliché though it sounds, she’s spent the past two years beating the odds. One year after her attack and following amputation, she was already back in the water, racing at a level she never expected after college.

“I was swimming at Yale, and that was kind of where my career was going to end. I felt like it was an ambitious goal to say, ‘I want to go Division I, and I want to be an impact player on that team and score pivotal points at All Ivy Championships,'” says Truwit. “But I swim the same events that Katie Ledecky swims, and she’s incredible. So I kind of knew that realistically, that was where those ambitions were going to end.”

Because she was attacked in the ocean, Truwit felt compelled to regain comfort while swimming. Her Paralympic aspirations unfolded as she fell back in love with the water. Qualifying so soon after her amputation left Truwit feeling dually grateful for her “insane turnaround” recovery timeline, “but also how special and incredible that I could go represent my country and in a way thank all of the everyday American heroes who saved my life and helped me rebuild it,” she adds.

Physical recuperation has been one journey, but Truwit was also tasked with mentally healing from the painful trauma of the attack. She says she continuously works to find meaning in the “senseless trauma” that happened to her.

“I’ve really learned that helping is healing,” Truwit says. “I’m glad that I got to that place sooner rather than later because it’s healing for me in my journey to think that now I can use my story, or whatever impact I’m able to have, to now uplift others and help others through their challenges and their traumas too.”

It’s one of the reasons she launched her Stronger Than You Think foundation, which aims to support what Truwit considers to be the “three pillars” that helped save her life and rebuild it: prosthetics, water safety skills and the Paralympics.

So far, the organization has given eight prosthetics to women and girls in need of the equipment, which can be extremely expensive. The foundation has also secured five water safety grants, and according to Truwit, her team is currently “in conversation with Team USA about a major gift for the Paralympics.”

“It truly feels like a hug to my heart to be able to do that kind of work,” adds Truwit. “My goal really right now is to continue growing that nonprofit. I do want to get it to this place where it’s a household name, impacting as many people as it can and spreading that message of hope.”

Truwit’s rapid recovery and success have already impressed millions, between her Paralympic success, her modeling work with Sports Illustrated Swimsuit, and, most recently, her multi-year sponsorship deal with Nike.

Now Truwit is setting out to achieve even more. Just as Matthew the first responder predicted, she’s currently training to run the New York City Marathon on a prosthetic blade this November. She’ll be running it with her mom, with whom Truwit also ran her first marathon in Copenhagen 10 days before the share attack.

Much like with the Paralympics, Truwit’s latest aspiration sprouted from her efforts to reclaim activities she enjoyed before the attack.

“Really since I got home from the Paralympics, that idea [of running the marathon] just planted itself. It started to percolate of, ‘What if I could do that and how special would that be?'” she recalls. It’ll be a full circle moment, too, since New York City is also where she underwent her amputation.

“There’s a place that can hold some hard memories, and then I can also create new ones that show me again my strength and how far I’ve come as well,” Truwit notes.

She attributes most of her mindset management to lessons learned from her mother, who is a cognitive behavioral therapist. Truwit practices the key tentpole of “holding the dialectic where two things can be true at once.” It provided a framework through which she can approach her healing, both physical and mental.

She’s still regaining strength, coping with what happened and learning new things, like how to run the full 26.2 miles on a blade, but those steps aren’t holding her back. Her competitive fire burns too bright to wait for someone else to tell her she’s ready to achieve a new milestone.

“A lot of what’s helped me these past two years are lifelong habits that I have had, and I have a lifelong habit of setting really big bold goals for myself,” says Truwit. “With that comes so many times where I fall short and fail, so I have this proven track record of times [when] I went for it, I didn’t get it, I went back, I worked hard and I eventually got there. Or I didn’t sometimes, but I know that I’ll get right back up.”

The challenges she faces today “look very different than what they used to look like in middle school,” Truwit admits. “But [it’s] that same mentality: ‘Today isn’t going my way but I’ll get back up tomorrow and try again.'”

“I know that I can get back up,” Truwit tells PEOPLE. “The more that you do that, it builds on itself and shows you that you can. And you will.”