Pain and courage: giving a life a new direction | Features

Ali Truwit (senior ’23) has always loved the water. As a teenager in Darien, Connecticut, she played in the pool in her family’s backyard. She swam on a local team. Yale, where her mother and uncle had swum before her, recruited her as a swimmer. Even when she couldn’t compete her senior year due to a thyroid condition, she was poolside. She and another Yale swimmer made plans to go to Turks and Caicos right after graduating in 2023. She and her family had snorkeled in the bright blue waters there many times.

Truwit is a planner, someone who doesn’t leave the future to chance if she can avoid it. This interlude on the beach was part of a tightly scheduled summer of travel that culminated in her taking a job at McKinsey & Company in the fall. If all went well, she would then go to Harvard Business School two years later to do an MBA. She had submitted her application. She had just run a marathon. Everything was set.

On May 24, 2023, she and her friend Sophie Pilkinton (Year ’19) were snorkeling from a boat near a beach Truwit knew. As they were making their way back, a shark appeared. “Sophie saw it in front of me. And it came from behind and then next to us,” Truwit says. “The next thing I remember is it was underneath us.” The shark rammed her, bumping into her and pushing against her. “Pretty quickly, it had my leg in its mouth,” she says.

They called for help. No one came. They swam for their lives. The safe boat lay in front of them.

“I remember thinking: Am I crazy or do I not have my foot? And I turned around to look,” Truwit says today. “It was really one of the worst images that stayed with me for a long time, just seeing my footless leg bleeding in the clear blue water.”

What to do when everything falls apart? No one can know in advance how they will react. Pilkinton and Truwit threw themselves onto the boat, and Pilkinton, who had just finished medical school, put a tourniquet around Truwit’s leg to cut off the blood supply to her wound. The rest of the day and night merged into a nightmare of hospital rooms and pain and, finally, a rescue flight to a hospital in Miami.

Truwit hoped there would be a way back to the old reality where she had two feet and ran marathons. Someone had found her foot floating in the sea. It still had a flipper on it.

But the attack had been too long ago to reattach her foot. On her 23rd birthday, eight days after the attack, part of her leg was amputated so that she could eventually wear a prosthetic. This was the new reality. It was hard to say exactly what it would contain.

As a swimmer at Yale, Truwit was known for her enthusiasm and determination, as well as her speed. Yale swim coach Jim Henry remembers her gauging the mood of the group and trying to figure out what to say after a big loss or how to comfort someone going through a tough time. “She has a twinkle in her eye and a smile, and when she gives you that, she thinks about what she can do to make it better,” Henry says. “That’s her way of processing things: ‘Let me figure this out. I can do this.'”

She made friends quickly as a student—Pilkinton and diver Hannah Walsh (class of 2019), who is several years older than her, became her closest confidants. In addition, Henry explains, every new swimmer at Yale is assigned to a family of older athletes, one from each of the senior classes. The young swimmer and her “mother,” “grandmother,” “great-grandmother,” etc. meet often. “They make friends quickly and spend a lot of time together,” he says. “Not only do they train and swim together, but they also eat together. They enjoy taking classes together and studying together. They go to the movies together. They go to restaurants together. They go on vacation together.”

Walsh remembers joking around with Truwit and Pilkinton in their hotel after a 14-hour bus ride to a meeting in Columbus, Ohio, watching movies and scaring each other. Truwit’s father once teased her on the way to the airport for being rude enough to check a bag—now she laughs at the memory and says she thinks of him every time she checks a suitcase. During the COVID pandemic, when Walsh was doing research in New Haven, Truwit moved in with her for a while. “Sophie and I were best friends from day one, and Ali became a best friend, too,” Walsh says. “We just became really close.”

As the text messages began to fly and news of Truwit’s attack spread through the Yale swimming community, support poured in. Truwit’s mother’s teammates took turns sending her flowers each week. Her former Yale teammate Duncan Lee (graduating class of 2020), who now works at MIT with a well-known prosthetist, got in touch to discuss how to start the prosthetic path. When Truwit was moved to her parents’ first-floor guest room to recover, another teammate decorated the place with photos of Yale swimmers and other friends to give it a welcoming and warm atmosphere.

After Pilkinton, who likely saved Truwit’s life with the tourniquet on the boat deck, Walsh was the teammate best placed to make an immediate impact. The Miami hospital Truwit was flown to happened to be the one Walsh worked at. She was there in the emergency room when Truwit landed. She was there when Truwit was anesthetized for her first surgery. And she was there when Truwit prepared to be flown north for her final surgery at a New York hospital, and everything that came after that.

Truwit, recovering at her parents’ home in Darien, had a lot to think about. The thought that the joy she had felt in the water could be taken away from her terrified her. She wanted to get back in the backyard pool. She also wanted to get strong again while she waited for her wound to heal so she could get a prosthetic. But it was hard. When she got in the water, she had flashbacks to the attack. It was physically exhausting. “The nerve endings in my leg were responding to new sensations in the water,” she says. And she struggled with how other people might perceive her. Jamie Barone, the head coach of the Chelsea Piers swim team in Stamford and Truwit’s coach as a child, says he got a text from her one day that broke his heart a little.

“It was as if I was saying, ‘If you can hold my leg, I’ll try again. And if you come back and coach me, that would be great,'” he recalls. “I don’t think she understood that no one would be repelled.” He walked to the pool where she was already in the water. “Okay, let’s get this over with,” he said. “Let me see it.” She lifted the rest of her leg out of the water. He looked at it and said, “Okay, great. Now let’s go ahead. Let’s start swimming.”

Starting in October 2023, Truwit and Barone began training four days a week for 90 minutes a day. They tentatively decided that Truwit could compete in a US Paralympics Swimming competition in December, which organizes competitions for swimmers with disabilities. But those first two months were incredibly difficult, Barone recalls. “She cried in the water almost every day,” he says. “She was terrified of being seen by anyone she knew.” They talked a lot about it, about new expectations for her speed, about the future. When she first appeared in public with her prosthetic leg, three Yale teammates were by her side.

Some days there was more talking than swimming. “A lot of talking happened while she was in the water. It’s amazing when you think about it, because that’s the environment where she suffered almost unimaginable trauma,” Barone says. “But I think that’s honestly her safe place. That’s where she feels at home.” Truwit has never missed a training session.

After two months of training, Truwit competed in the US Paralympics Swimming Nationals. She swam well and now had to decide: did she want to continue? She had worked out a solution with McKinsey so she could start work later than planned. Five days after her amputation, she had even had her Zoom interview for the Harvard program and had been accepted. But if she kept training, she might have a chance to qualify for the Paralympics in Paris. Get used to your new life, Barone suggested. Take some time to do that. With the support of her employer, Truwit eventually decided to delay starting work.

Training for the Paralympics meant competing in competitions all over the place and swimming alongside athletes whose successes boosted her confidence. “It was so amazing for me to see all these incredible athletes overcoming obstacles and doing incredible things in the water,” Truwit says. “I think it gave me so much hope and strength for my own journey.” Her parents, Jody ’92 and Mitch Truwit, and her brothers were often there to cheer her on.

On June 28, Truwit was in Minneapolis to secure a spot in Paris. She was competing in her sixth race of the event, the 100-meter freestyle. She was behind right at the start – not unusual, Barone says, since she can’t immediately summon the power of a two-footed athlete. By the time she reached the other side and bounced off the wall, she was in second place by eight-tenths of a second, a pretty big gap in competitive swimming. But then something happened, and in videos of the event, Truwit can be seen suddenly accelerating. “In the last 25 meters, she caught up with the girl,” Barone says. “It was crazy. It’s completely insane.”

Truwit qualified for the Paris Games just over a year after her attack. For her, it’s a satisfaction that, alongside everything she’s lost, she’s also been able to gain some things back. It’s also a reminder that sometimes, if you can just control your reaction, with time, patience and lots of ups and downs, you can find a way to a new reality. The grief is still very real. “There are days when I’m down. There are days when it’s really hard and too much,” she says. “On those days, I’ve learned to be forgiving of myself.”

“As an athlete and my whole life, I’ve been someone who’s struggled through it,” she continues. “Learning that you can take those days, you can spend the days on the couch and cry, and then get up the next day and be grateful for what you have and who you have and keep going was such a big thing.”