Outstanding octogenarian pillar of Cooktown community
WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH
March is Women’s History Month so we are shining a spotlight on the spectacular women making history in Far North Queensland.
Cooktown’s own super-gran proves it’s never too late in life in get fit and turn your life around.
Susan Forsyth, now a robust 82-years-old, started swimming in her 70s as a way to keep fit and has since become a stalwart of the Cooktown Community Swimming Pool.
Cook Shire Council Pool Coordinator, Ros Logan, said she has seen an inspiring change in Ms Forsyth since she started swimming.
“She couldn’t swim a lap of the 25m pool when she first started swimming in her 70s,” Mrs Logan said.
“Now she can swim more than 130 laps.”
Ms Forsyth is the pool’s volunteer “professional greeter” and assists with school swimming lessons and Council’s Learn to Swim program and is training to be a certified AustSwim instructor.
The inspirational senior was a baton-bearer for the Queen’s Baton Relay as it made its way through Cooktown last year on the way to the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games.
She also competed in the 2013 Great Barrier Reef Masters Games, winning medals in all five races she competed in – three bronzes and two silvers.
When the mother of seven, grandmother of 10 and great-grandmother of two isn’t greeting people at the pool, she keeps herself very busy.
She is dedicated to helping others, swimming laps or doing aqua aerobics, weeding the pool gardens, enjoying senior’s fitness on the foreshore or spending time with her family.
If you know an incredible woman in the region who deserves to be celebrated for Women’s History Month, get in touch via email and let us know why she is so amazing.
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