Sister Madonna Buder - The Grace to Race: The Wisdom and Inspiration of the 80-Year-Old World Champion Triathlete Known as the Iron Nun

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Copyright 2010 by Sister Madonna Buder

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition October 2010

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Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Buder, Madonna, Sister

The grace to race : the wisdom and inspiration of the 80-year-old world champion triathlete known as the iron nun / Sister Madonna Buder with Karin Evans.

p. cm.

1. Buder, Madonna, Sister. 2. AthletesUnited StatesBiography. 3. NunsUnited StatesBiography. 4. AthletesReligious life. 5. Triathlon. 6. Ironman triathlons. I. Evans, Karin. II. Title.

GV697.B84A3 2010

796.092dc22

[B] 2010022660

ISBN 978-1-4391-7748-8
ISBN 978-1-4391-7750-1 (ebook)

All photographs not otherwise credited are courtesy of the author.

To my Creator, the Gift-Giver,
and to my devoted parents

THE FIRST TIME I ever heard about Sister Madonna Buder she had been blown off her bicycle, landing head first on the Queen Kaahumanu Highway. She was competing in the 2000 Hawaiian Ironman, speeding downhill on the Big Island. Hunched over her handle bars, the Hawaiian sun beating down on her back, she was caught off guard by a strong side gust. Suddenly she was airborne, her bike and body carried two yards before being deposited on the lava road. She suffered a fractured jaw and broken collarbone, plus it took a dozen stitches to close up the damage to her face.

When I reached her by phone just two weeks later and gingerly asked her how she was doing, almost the first words out of her mouth were, I just cant wait to get back on that bicycle! It had taken forty-five minutes for the ambulance to arrive that day. While she lay there waiting, she felt no fear, no despair. I was going lickety-split, she recounted. I cant really explain it, but I felt comfortable lying there in my wreckage. I just thought, How can I pull out of this?

Her strongest feeling was a swelling of gratitude for two of her fellow competitors, a man and a woman who jumped off their bicycles and came to her aid. That was the real miracle, she said. They didnt even get to finish their own race.

What the pair who stayed by her side found most remarkable was this: The racer lying in the road, who until that moment had been competing in one of the most grueling athletic events on earth, was not only a Roman Catholic nunshe was seventy years old.

For most people of whatever age, that crash might have ended their competitive days. For Sister Madonna, it was just a brief interruption. If Id been airborne any higher, Id be flapping my wings! she exclaimed to me in her lovely, lyrical voice. At this remark she actually giggled, then added, I lay there in a pool of my own blood and thought, Well, Lord, Im not going to finish this race today but Im going to be all right. I just remember feeling at peace.

When Sister Madonna laced up a pair of hand-me-down sneakers to take a run down the beach at age forty-eight, no one could have predicted that someday shed be a world champion, eventually known as the Iron Nun, the Running Nun, the Mother Superior of Triathlon. Yet four years later, after she tackled the Boston Marathon at the age of fifty-two, the writer and famous runner George Sheehan noted with admiration, God was watching Sister Madonna Buder and she knew it.

Today, after thirty-one years of competition, Sister Madonna holds dozens of records, including International Triathlon Union World Championships, as well as age group records for the Hawaiian and Canadian Ironman eventseach of which requires a 2.4mile swim, a 112mile bicycle ride, and a full marathon of 26.2 miles. In 1999, she was honored by the USA Triathlon Organization and Competitor magazine as the female Grandmaster Triathlete of the Year. Two years later, she was given the Iron Spirit Award by the International Triathlon Union World Championship committee.

Her records in some cases apply not just to her own age group, but to younger categories as well. In fact, she routinely has outpaced both men and women who are far younger than she is. In one race, as Sister Madonna sailed by a group of sixty-year-olds, no one was too surprised. Then she passed some fifty-year-olds, and began gaining on the forties. A cheer went up from the younger crowd. Do you believe it? Way to go! I hope I look that good when I am seventy! Shes managed to outrunliterallytwo of her physicians, themselves triathletes and younger than she is, who have helped her through various exercise-induced traumas.

At competitive events, Sister Madonna is sought out for her inspiring presence and her spiritual advice. Often, before a race, she can be found huddled with other runners, praying for them and with them. Race directors often ask her to bless the crowd before the race beginsor maybe put in a good word for decent weather. She spreads the message of positive spirit, inspiration, and love to a lot of people, says a race organizer.

As the years have passed, Sister Madonna has gone on to finish events that most people her age wouldnt think of trying. In 2005, the age 7579 category was created for her at the Hawaiian Ironman in Kona, where she set the record as the oldest woman ever to finish. She did this just eight weeks after she suffered a broken elbow in a bicycle crash during a qualifying race.

She runs with a steel plate in one hip and metal screws and pins in both elbowsher scrap metal, she calls it. No wonder I am an iron woman. My right arm has suffered six incidents. Its a wonder its still hanging on. In 1987, she ran the last eight miles of the Hawaiian Ironman with a fractured right foot. In 1988, she competed with two broken toes; and in 2000, there was that horrific bicycle crash in Hawaii.

I do it by putting one foot in front of the other, she says, although there have been some dark moments out there.

In 2008, at the age of seventy-eight, the Iron Nun ran the Boston Marathon again, twenty-five years after her debut. That year she also competed in more than a dozen triathlons and fifteen Senior Olympics events. In some instances, she actually improved on her former times. When a Canadian gerontologist asked her about this achievement, she simply said, Well, thats whats fun about this. You know, after a certain number of years, youre competing with yourself, because if you live long enough, everybody else falls by the wayside. So you either have to choose men to beat because there are no women, or beat up on yourself.

At least one physician has expressed interest in studying Sister Madonna to learn what gives her the physical edge she seems to have. But Sister Madonna has resisted submitting herself to such studies. Shed rather be out doing good works or running through the woods than spinning her wheels on a treadmill, hooked up to wires.