Ali Truwit’s decision to run the 2025 New York City Marathon

Truwit’s decision to run the New York City Marathon came from a desire to reclaim another part of herself that she thought she had lost forever.

“I thought I was never going to run again,” she told Olympics.com.  

Her experience in Paris had already helped her rediscover her love of the water and come to terms with her new body, exposed in the pool. “Through it, I learned how to see beauty in my new body, how to appreciate its strength.”

That sense of acceptance became a driving force, and as foreign as the running blade sometimes felt, she was determined to reclaim running. “It really is, if you can see it, you can be it. If it takes me running on a blade, then it takes me running on a blade. People love me for my heart, not for my left leg.”

Even now, she admits to moments of discomfort when the world’s eyes linger a little too long as she jogs through New York’s streets. Yet she has learnt to reframe those stares as the start of a new kind of visibility.

“I’m representing so that the next amputee who goes out doesn’t get those,” she said. “I want to be able to give that to other people so that they can feel the same way I feel about reclaiming that life joy. And maybe we’ll see them running a marathon someday too.”

The learning curve of a blade

Running on a prosthetic has come with its own learning curve.

“There have been a lot of nuances on a prosthetic blade that I’m continuing to learn,” she said of the marathon training. “The small things feel bigger to me now.”

Without the feedback of a foot or an ankle, cracks in the pavement, subtle inclines, even the crown of a road that slopes slightly toward the gutter, all became variables that could shift her balance and alter her stride. “I would never think about this unless it actually affected the way I was running and feeling,” she said. “When your leg’s on one side of a sloped road, you’re out of alignment because the height’s off. It’s a lot of little things like that.”

The prosthesis itself, engineered to match the height of her sound leg, is also set to a particular pace range. That means Truwit can’t simply decide to sprint one day and jog the next. “I’ve had to go back and forth to my prosthetist so many times for adjustments,” she explained. “There’s a lot of trial and error.”

She also has to manage heat and friction under the liner that secures her prosthetic. During the marathon, she’ll need to stop mid-race to dry her leg and reattach the blade. “It’s so frustrating,” she admitted. “You’re in a groove, then suddenly you have to stop. But that’s just part of it.”

Truwit found familiar ground in the discipline of training, her approach mirroring that of her Paralympic preparation: structured, patient, and mentally robust. “There are days when it feels hard or heavy or I’m learning so many new things,” she said. “But then I come back to how lucky I am to even have a running blade.”

Truwit will run in New York with a team of twelve, a circle of family and friends, with whom she has shared every part of this journey—the recovery, the Paralympics, now the marathon. “To have them running alongside me is such a gift,” she said. “It makes the training go faster. We talk, we laugh, and suddenly the miles feel lighter.”

For her, the journey has become its own reward. “The big shiny thing at the end is nice,” she said. “But the journey really is the reward. If you’d told me two years ago that I’d run 18 miles on a prosthetic blade, I’d have said absolutely not,” she laughed. “But here I am.”