If Nuns Ruled the World (9 page)

Songs of bird waking

Introducing a new day

Sweetly soothe the soul

Stillness, then movement

Sudden breeze comes from nowhere

Stirring emotions

When she has trouble breathing, she will wheeze the Lord's name in and out—Jesus on the inhale and Jesus on the exhale. This hallowed breathing has sustained her for hours at a time.

“When nothing is happening and people pop into my mind for no good reason, I just ask the Lord to bless them then and there because I figure they probably need prayers,” she said.

During one race, Sister Madonna was praying in her head,
Bless the Lord.
One foot dropped.
Praise His Holy Name.
Down went the other. She noticed a man in the road who was struggling and didn't look like he could make it any farther. She began chanting the prayer out loud. When she reached him, she called out to him. “Try it! It will help pick up your pace!” she yelled into the wind. He mustered his strength and began the chant, racing ahead of her, but he waited for her at the finish line. They crossed together and finished the prayer. He wrote the words on the back of his race jersey so he would remember her. It is instances like this that make Sister Madonna a staple at races, the unofficial chaplain of the racing world. Race officials often ask her to do invocations at the starting line, and on more than one occasion she has helped to pray away bad weather, including a hurricane that once threatened a race.

Sometimes people will linger alongside her and ask quietly if they can just touch her for good luck. “So many people see her as an inspiration,” Ironman announcer Steve King told me. “The aura around her is stunning, whether you are religious or not. People just melt in her presence.”

Learning to run in her late forties helped Sister Madonna rediscover the adventurous spirit she had been missing since she entered the convent. She wanted to push herself further, and as she approached age fifty, she wanted a new adventure. A year earlier she was sitting at home spending a rare night in front of the television when she spotted a movie starring Joanne Woodward called
See How She Runs
. In the movie, a middle-aged schoolteacher struggles to complete the Boston Marathon. Sister Madonna was taken by the character's persistence in the race. The agony Ms. Woodward's character experienced in that film reminded her of the many agonies endured by Christ as he was carrying the cross to Calvary.

“In one scene in the movie, someone hands her a towel to wipe the sweat from her face. I thought immediately of Veronica using her veil to wipe the bloody sweat from Jesus's face while he was carrying the cross,” Sister Madonna told me.

And so, shortly after the Bloomsday race, Sister Madonna knew that she wanted to run a marathon, choosing to take on the race in Boston that she had seen in the film. The decision made her order nervous. What would people think? Their little Bloomsday race was one thing, but a nun in shorts, running in front of thousands of people in a big city, with millions watching at home? That would be a spectacle. Would people laugh at her? What would the priests think? What if the Vatican found out?

One of her fellow sisters even commented, “You are such a free spirit. We don't know how to contain you.” Sister Madonna restrained herself, but inside she was thinking, Why should you try to?

This was 1982, twenty years after the start of the Second Vatican Council. By then, plenty of sisters had already given up their long-skirted black habits. In 1966, one avant-garde order, the Daughters of Charity, even consulted the French fashion designer Christian Dior about what they should wear in the habit's stead. Dior created a new modern habit with sleek, angular lines that showed slightly more skin. But Sister Madonna's order wasn't so progressive. They were one of the few clinging tightly to the old ways and still wore a modified habit well into the early 1980s. That was just fine with Sister Madonna, who preferred conservative dress anyway. Even today, she wishes orders hadn't been so quick to give it up and still longs for the days when even laywomen wore long ballerina-style skirts instead of pants, asserting, “It is a rarity to see women in skirts anymore.”

Some of the sisters suggested she wear the habit while she ran. When Sister Madonna pictured herself on the starting line of a race in full habit, she knew that would be even more of a spectacle; by wearing shorts, she would melt into the scenery. All she wanted out of this important race was to be lost in the crowd. She didn't even know if she would be able to finish it, so there was definitely no need to call even more attention to herself. She would wear the shorts!

Times may have changed, but Sister Madonna didn't want to blindside anyone with her plans. She figured it would be best to alert the local bishop that she would be participating. She was nervous when she saw him sitting stern and upright in his chair as she approached.

“Bishop, I want to tell you about a plan I have to run the Boston Marathon, taking pledges for MS, a cause greater than myself,” Sister Madonna said in the biggest voice she could muster. He visibly relaxed and his lips curled into a grin as he gave her his blessing. As she was leaving, he called out to her, “I wish some of my priests would do what you are doing.”

Sister Madonna called on Jesus for help during the last four miles of the Boston Marathon. Not stopping at any aid stations along the race course, she began to struggle during the final four miles of the race. Her prayer pulled her through. Wearing the T-shirt the sisters had given her before her departure with a paraphrase from Saint Paul (Philippians 3:4) that read
running toward the goal
, she completed twenty-six miles with a time of three hours and thirty-eight minutes. She was fifty-two. The next year, she shaved six minutes off her time. As of 2013, she has run the Boston Marathon seven more times.

Sister Madonna believes that whatever talent she has is God-given, and He obviously expects her to use it. The words of Christ continue to inspire her: “You have not chosen me. I have chosen you” (John 15:16). She had not chosen to run. Running had been introduced to her by a priest. A triathlon was the next obvious step for the nun.

She recalls thinking, “Well, I've done the epitome of foolishness by engaging in the marathon at my age; why not try this thing too?” She was perfectly capable on a bicycle, though she hadn't actually ridden one in years, and that was her mother's balloon-tired cruiser bike with no handbrakes—you just reverse-pedaled to halt it. As a kid, she would swim in Lake Michigan on family vacations, but she was terrified of the idea of swimming in a swarming school of flailing limbs. She tried to ignore these apprehensions as she prepared for the challenge.

Her first triathlon was a local race in Spokane called Heels & Wheels, where the three-quarter-mile swim took place in a local pool and the twelve-mile biking section rolled up and down lush green hills. Her second race was the Troika, a formidable half Ironman of 1.2 miles of swimming, 56 miles of biking, and 13.1 miles of running. Her competitive edge was getting sharper, and she began to understand how people could become addicted to the highs of distance running. Throughout her first ten years of racing, she struggled to remain true to herself and not let her competitive streak push her beyond what seemed reasonable. “Know Thyself” and “To Thine Own Self Be True” became her new mantras. There weren't triathlon coaches around in the late '80s, so Sister Madonna just winged it. Even though she was able to curb her own competitive spirit, she couldn't control that in others. You might think no one would bully an elderly nun, but you would be wrong! During a triathlon on the Gold Coast in Australia, a woman in Sister Madonna's age group tried to psych her out.

“I understand they have sharks out there,” the woman said before the pair plunged into the salty sea. Sister Madonna simply smiled sweetly back and said, “Oh, those poor things! How will they know which of these thrashing bodies to choose? They'll probably be freaked out.” It was the perfect response, and after that the woman didn't torment her anymore. Sister Madonna beat her in that race.

It was only a matter of time before momentum propelled Sister Madonna into an Ironman. She had just celebrated her silver anniversary, twenty-five years with the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, when her friend Roy Allen, a retired police officer and fellow triathlete, returned from his first successful Ironman in Kona, Hawaii.

“Sister, you have got to do this race,” Allen said, still high from completing his first Ironman. He had piqued her curiosity and she couldn't let go of the challenge, but as usual, God had other plans. While training, various accidents kept delaying her entry into the Ironman race at Kona. While visiting St. Louis for her parents' fifty-fifth wedding anniversary, Sister Madonna borrowed her nephew's bike for a ride around town. Suicide brakes, so named because they stop one abruptly, were a new concept to the nun, and upon squeezing them the way she would other brakes, she flew over the handlebars.

“I had no idea I was gushing blood from my elbow,” Sister Madonna said. It turned out to be a compound fracture that would keep her in the hospital for a week. Afraid her legs would atrophy while she was bedridden, she snuck into the stairwell at night to run up and down the eight flights of stairs. Three weeks later, she ran the Diet Pepsi Championship 10K race in New York City in a half-cast, taking fourth place among the women in her age group. She planned to take on the Ironman again the next year, but yet another borrowed bike interfered with her well-laid plans.

On September 8, 1984, just a month before the Hawaiian Ironman, Sister Madonna biked out to Liberty Lake on the Washington–Idaho border to take in an open-water swim. On the ride back, she was crossing traffic with the green light when a car came directly at her from behind. She swerved and cleared the car by four inches, falling down hard on her left hip. It was broken in two places.

“I knew this Ironman attempt was also a goner,” she told me. “I thought,
God, what do you think about me doing an Ironman, anyway?
” She later realized that the accident precipitated a major turning point in her life.

“Having to lay with my leg raised above my heart to prevent any further advance of phlebitis originating from the broken hip, one of our sisters thrust a book into my hands called
Sudden Spring,
written by Lillanna Kopp—formerly a Holy Name sister,” Sister Madonna told me. It described a new concept of religious life suggested by Pope John XXIII during the Second Vatican Council that led to the founding of Sisters for Christian Community, a group of religious women that called for a more participatory vocation in which all women were considered coequals.

“In keeping with the times, it seemed a perfect fit for me,” Sister Madonna went on. “I took my vows at their annual assembly in St. Louis, my own hometown, that year. These sisters have continued to be a source of encouragement and inspiration to me.”

By the following year, Sister Madonna was finally healed and able to compete.

The woman taking the entries at Kona squinted at the nun through sun-crinkled eyes with a look of serious concern. She told the little old nun she didn't think she could handle the high temperatures during the Hawaiian race.

But Sister Madonna responded, “Really, I can take the heat. I was born in a hundred and five degrees in St. Louis and have been used to the heat ever since.”

She was still limping from the hip injury, and to make matters worse, a few months earlier she had fallen again and broken some ribs while continuing to train after completing a marathon in Australia. When she reached Hawaii, cortisone shots dulled some of the pain, but a new obstacle loomed: a hurricane was expected to hit the Big Island the day of the big race. Instead, it veered out into the ocean, whipping up the currents with four-foot swells.

A man on a surfboard kept paddling next to Sister Madonna after the swim turnaround, yelling instructions, but as she neared the pier, she felt like she was swimming in place. The scenery below her never changed. As a result, she was four minutes shy of the two-hour-and-fifteen-minute cutoff, which prevented her from taking off on the bike. Her first Ironman was doomed. Had the cutoff been the usual two hours and twenty minutes, as it is today, she would have made it.

“Yet I was so close, I just kept thinking to myself that I had to do it again. Nothing is impossible with God,” she said.

The next year, 1986, she completed the race in fourteen hours and thirty-one minutes, despite stopping during the running portion to help a dehydrated woman and walking with her until an ambulance came.

Since then, Sister Madonna has competed in one or two Ironman competitions a year, in addition to a handful of half Ironman distances, triathlons of other lengths, and running events including marathons. Sister Madonna's best-ever Ironman time came at age sixty-two, when she finished in thirteen hours and sixteen minutes.

She giggles when people ask her how she trains.

“I don't. I really don't. I like to tell them I just keep moving all the time. I run to church when I can. I literally
run
errands,” Sister Madonna said. “I watch for chances to bike outdoors whenever I can. I really don't enjoy using mechanical devices indoors.”

She doesn't have a coach, at least not in the physical sense of the word.

“My coach is the Man Upstairs,” she says. “He gave me a body to listen to. I don't need any contraptions to listen to my body. It speaks out loud enough.”

She actually takes the shortest route possible in her runs from the small mobile home she lives in all by herself to Mass at St. Anthony's Church in Spokane, Washington, most days, making the round trip of just under five miles in long pants that are suitably conservative for a Catholic Mass. She rides or runs almost everywhere, some days doing a mini-triathlon just to get around, which requires squeezing in a mile-plus swim as well. She lives by the sun's cycle, going to bed when it is dark, waking up when it is light, never setting an alarm. She eats what is available, mostly carbohydrates and fresh vegetables and fruits. She grows what she can in a small garden and occasionally indulges in her weakness for chocolate-chip cookies. In the summer she laps up ice cream almost every single day.