Grandma from Pretoria proves that it’s never too late to chase your dreams
Sometimes it sounds like a cliché when people say that they will never give up on their bucket-list dreams, but a grandmother from Pretoria has proven in the past few years that it can indeed be fulfilled with determination and perseverance.
By the time most other people reach the age of Ingrid Trusler, they start making plans to retire and take life more slowly.
This teacher from Pretoria could probably have followed that path as well, but her achievements at the recent World Aquatics Masters Championships, which took place in Japan last month, serve as proof that she is still chasing her dreams with the energy of a young woman.
Trusler, who competed at the event in the women’s 60-64 age group, returned from Japan with four gold medals as a reward for all her hard work.
Three of her medals were won in the pool (200m freestyle; 400m freestyle and 800m freestyle), while she also won the 3km open water event.
The story behind Trusler’s recent success as a swimmer has a very interesting twist. It’s the story of big setbacks at a young age, but then at the same time it’s also an epic story of that little flame of unfulfilled dreams that keeps burning and never extinguished over decades.
Photo: Koos Venter
Trusler started swimming as a young girl of 5 and soon showed that she had the talent to become a very good swimmer. As a schoolgirl in Edenvale, she already won provincial colours in swimming at 9, while at 14 she made the SA schools team.
At the age of 15, she was already at Olympic Standard with the times she swam, even though South Africa had already been kicked out of Olympic participation for almost a decade due to politics. However, it was also at that age that a serious shoulder injury cut her swimming career short.
Her parents tried everything, but several doctors’ opinions diagnosed her problem as too delicate and dangerous for operations. The only conclusion was that she had to stop swimming, as it posed a danger to her health.
The young Ingrid got on with her life without swimming, obtained her teaching degree at Wits and later married husband Karl, with whom she raised four children – a daughter and three sons. The family settled in Pretoria 32 years ago and these days Ingrid and Karl are also the proud grandparents of ten grandchildren.
About twenty years ago, in her early forties, Trusler decided to try swimming again when her children also began to excel in the sport, especially open water swimming.
However, it was only in 2019, the year before Covid, that she realized she no longer really felt any burden from her former injury. She joined the Coelacanth Masters Swimming Club in Pretoria and started participating in masters’ galas in which she performed very well.
When Covid struck, Trusler was already so motivated that she spent hours in the pool in their yard during the lockdown period. The moment things returned to normal, there was no stopping this remarkable sportswoman. She still participated in masters’ galas, while between 2021 and this year she won the Midmar Mile open water swimming competition (women masters) three years in a row.
She also took part in the 8-mile and 16-mile Charity Challenge during the Midmar Mile this year. As a master’s swimmer, she achieved second place overall.
A few days after her achievements at this year’s Midmar Mile, Trusler achieved another dream in a special way – a feat that only a select group of swimmers in South Africa could already achieve.
After completing her 16-mile Charity Challenge at the Midmar dam on Friday, she was barely home on Sunday when she got a call to inform her that within only two days there would be an opportunity to swim the gruelling Robben Eiland-to-Bloubergstrand challenge. She agreed, got on a plane to Cape Town on the Monday and that Tuesday she successfully completed the 7.5km swimming challenge in the open sea between Robben Island and Bloubergstrand in freezing cold water. Another bucket list item ticked off.
Trusler is enjoying every moment of her newfound swimming career and is already looking forward to the next World Aquatics Masters Championships, which will take place in February next year in the city of Doha in Quatar.
These days she also strives to get more swimmers involved in Masters swimming and hopes that next year more of her clubmates can go along to compete in Qatar against the world’s best masters.
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