by Jo Piazza
“My parents heard the word ‘kiss’ once too often and they decided the solution was, rather than explain the birds and the bees to me, to transfer me to an all-girls school,” Sister Madonna said. She called Visitation Academy “The Dungeon” since it was a huge castle replete with gargoyles, a belfry, and long dark corridors.
The sisters at Visitation Academy had an immediate effect on the young girl, especially her grammar teacher, Sister Consolata, who was unendingly patient with Madonna as she struggled to learn how to diagram sentences. Sister Madonna describes in her autobiography, The Grace to Race, how she was influenced by the nuns and would watch them from the corners of the chapel as they chanted at Vespers each afternoon before her study hall. Back at home, Madonna built a small altar to the Virgin Mary in her bedroom, where she would sit in her free time meditating and praying. From the start, she felt a special bond with the Blessed Mother.
Being pretty and popular, Madonna was courted by many eligible young men, including the late Dr. Tom Dooley, who was a dynamo at the piano. An accomplished equestrian, she appeared on the cover of Tempo magazine in 1951 looking like the spitting image of Elizabeth Taylor at the same age. Her dance card was always completely full.
Even with all this attention, she felt a distinct emptiness and knew something was missing in her life.
“It was then I knew that no man was going to be able to fill the recesses of my heart like God Himself,” Sister Madonna told me. The hardest thing about knowing she would become a nun was breaking the news to her father. Though she invited him to lunch one day in public to announce it, this did not restrain his tears, as he had expected her to tell him she was engaged to the young Irish Marine she had been spending so much time with, so well had she held the secret in her heart.
Once in the convent, the elder sisters usually ask the young nuns what their choice of name will be after they take their final vows. But to her dismay, no one ever asked her. She dropped hints like crazy, but to no avail. However, she couldn’t have been happier when they bestowed the name Sister Madonna on her.
Two profound events changed everything in Sister Madonna’s life. The first was the day in December 1956 when she professed her final vows to the Sisters of the Good Shepherd. She would spend the next twenty-odd years in God’s service working with socially disadvantaged young girls committed by the courts and receiving two master’s degrees, one in education and the other in counseling, from Arizona State University.
Then came her second moment of conversion, the day that she took her first run. She began running just a few weeks shy of her forty-eighth birthday at the suggestion of Fr. John Topel, a Jesuit priest who was conducting a workshop on spirituality at Rockaway on the Oregon coast. The priest thought running would be a joyful release for her, harmonizing mind, body, and soul, producing a sense of relaxation, calmness, and intimacy with the Almighty.
“Nothing could be that good,” Sister Madonna defiantly told him. Father John liked her spirit and dared her to run out on the beach in between two eddies without getting wet. Never one to back down from a challenge, she found a pair of running shorts in a pile of donation clothes and dug a pair of secondhand sneakers, given to her by her sister-in-law, out of her bag. To her surprise, the priest was right. The running felt good. She ran for five minutes without stopping, parallel to the slate-gray waves at dusk, her feet sinking into the sand in a soft crescendo, in between the two eddies half a mile apart. Father John was impressed.
“You must keep it up now,” he said. Sister Madonna ran along the beach every day for the remainder of the retreat. When she returned to the Sisters of the Good Shepherd convent in Spokane, Washington, she ran around the girls’ ballfield, guessing that twenty-eight laps was about seven miles. She wore long pants that flapped at the ankles and the same secondhand sneakers with thin flat soles to train for her first race, the local Bloomsday race of 8.2 miles, just five weeks after she began running.
She was harder on her body than she had ever been in her entire life, her calves becoming tight and her knees so swollen that she could hardly bend them. By her third week of training for Bloomsday, she broke down in tears.
She cried to God, “I just can’t do it.” When she quieted down, she heard what she describes as this small inner voice respond, “I know you’re stepping out in faith, not knowing what the end results will be, but I too had to step out in faith, complying with my Father’s will, not knowing how many people down through the ages would respond to my supreme act of love by laying down my life for them.” Then she pulled herself together and stepped out the side door for another excruciating run.
God is always with Sister Madonna. Their relationship isn’t about Him being “up there” and her being “down here.” She has intimate conversations in her head with God all day long. She prays when she runs, calling the movement a type of prayer posture. Sometimes she prays for individuals, as in her first-ever Bloomsday race when she prayed to God to transfer her will to endure to her brother to help him overcome his alcoholism and try to save the marriage that the disease was destroying. The marriage eventually broke apart, but his second wife was a Baptist who kept him from drinking, so Sister Madonna believes her prayers were answered in the end. On her long runs she sometimes recites the repetitive Hail Marys of the Rosary to lose track of the miles.
“Running not only helped me solve my problems, it reduced my anxiety and cleared my soul, taking away any brooding darkness that took away my positive attitude,” she told me.
Sometimes she is less specific with her prayers, just allowing herself to meditate on her surroundings, God’s creation, and the feeling of wholeness and balance she experiences as her feet fall on the pavement. These meditations often take the form of haikus she composes about nature. She repeats the lines of the poems in her head over and over until she can get home to write them down.
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 Jo
anne 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 sist
ers 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.
