A Salute to Trudy Thornton
5 April 2014
If you want to know who the toughest woman on the planet is, don't bother checking out MMA, boxing, or those pathetic "tough girl" challenges, because she's currently in Auckland Hospital: Trudy Thornton.
At 50, women in our society are usually approaching grandmotherhood with equanimity, growing gracefully older.
At 50, lying in a hospital bed with a hip joint so badly broken in a race fall that it required a bone graft, Trudy is just building up to get back on a racehorse. She has nearly died while riding, and a couple of years ago, chewed a doctor's ear so badly he let her ride rather than take her on when she was determined she could ride after a bad fall.
In typical Trudy style, she told the doctor the reason her eyes were closed when he got there is because she was catching her breath on the ground and had her eyes shut because it was sunny. No sane doctor would argue with this 47 kg package of TNT.
Keith Haub, former longtime Auckland race caller and racehorse owner used to say she was tougher than teak, and he is not wrong.
Next time you break a fingernail or get a paper cut, Trudy up.
Copyright © Alan Charman