By Matthew Halverson
Photograph by J. Craig Sweat
It’s a one-and-a-half-mile jog from the Sans Souci West mobile home park in Spokane, Wash., to St. Anthony’s Church and Rectory. It’s the kind of breezy run you might see an early morning jogger make before heading off for a day at the office, but to Sister Madonna Buder, it represents something much more sacred. For this very active nun, it’s the path on which her devotion to God and passion for intense physical exertion merge every day.
Those daily morning runs to Mass are part of Sister Madonna’s off-season training regimen. Affectionately nicknamed “the nun on the run” by her fellow runners, she’s a veteran of more than 300 triathlons and 50 marathons. That’s not the most amazing part of her story, though: The good sister is 75 years old. “I thought I was going to give this up when I was 60,” she laughs, “but I guess God will let me know when to stop.”
A native of Clayton and Ladue, Buder moved to the Pacific Northwest after joining the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in the 1960s. She caught the running bug in the late ’70s. In 1981, with a pair of hand-me-down tennis shoes and only five weeks of training, she entered an 8.2-mile run, hoping to inspire her brother to quit drinking. Of the 300 women in her age group, she finished fourth. A year later she was on the other coast, running the Boston Marathon.
It’s a nontraditional life for a nontraditional nun. One day she’ll counsel inmates in the local diocese’s prison ministry; the next she’ll ride her 18-speed bike 20 miles to swim a couple more miles in a lake. She’s gracious about having the strength to compete at her age, yet she refers to the people who cheer her on as her “public.” And forget the traditional black-and-white habit—you’re just as likely to see her in clingy spandex shorts and the latest running shoes from Nike. “I’ve known her over the years,” says Sister Judith Nilles of the Spokane diocese, “and, I say, more power to her that she’s able to witness in the way that she does.”
In August, Buder became the oldest woman to finish an Ironman triathlon in Canada, the fourth record she holds there. Not bad for a woman whose leg is held together by a metal plate and who has trouble competing these days without suffering severe nausea. But the way she sees it, she doesn’t really have a choice in the matter. “When you recognize that you have a talent, you owe it to your Creator to use it to honor Him,” she says. “You do Him a dishonor if you don’t use it.”
This month she’ll have the opportunity to share her message with her native city as a speaker at the Get Hooked on Health Expo, January 7 and 8 at the America’s Center. “Sister Madonna’s accomplishments and positive outlook inspire and motivate year after year,” says Ben Fertic, president of Ironman. “She truly embodies the Ironman spirit and continues to demonstrate that anything is possible.”
