The 91-year-old nun who runs triathlons

By Jo Piazza

November 17, 2021

Hi! Welcome to The Distance, a weekly newsletter devoted to long-term thinking and… athletic nuns. This week Jo Piazza is back. She wrote about friendship a few weeks ago.

Before we get into this week’s edition, an update: Next week The Distance is taking a breather for Thanksgiving. We’ll be back in your inbox on Dec. 1. If someone forwarded you this email, please subscribe. Now over to Jo:

You probably haven’t heard of Sister Madonna Buder, but I promise you that there are few athletes as inspiring as she is.

Sister Madonna is a 91-year-old Catholic nun who also happens to be the oldest woman to ever finish an Ironman triathlon, a record she obtained at age 82. Her nicknames are the Iron Nun and the Mother Superior of Triathlon. She’s petite: just 5’7” and 115 pounds of sinewy muscle. She’s completed more than 350 triathlons, many of them Ironman distance.

But that’s not the reason I’m so inspired by Sister Madonna. What gets me about her story is that she didn’t even start running or biking or doing any kind of physical fitness until the age of 47, well into middle age!

I met Sister Madonna almost a decade ago when I was researching a book on feminist Catholic sisters. After our first interview I wanted to talk to her every single day. For me, Madonna represents a model for how to keep your body moving, well into the second half of your life. I asked her how she got started intensely exercising at an age when most people have begun settling for walking the golf course. Her advice has stuck with me for all these years.

You just start.

Madonna took up running at the advice of a priest who told her that it would be a “joyful release” that would “harmonize her mind, body, and soul.” She laughed a little at his grandiose words but gave it a shot.

She grabbed a pair of sneakers from the church’s donation bin and took a run on the beach. From there she was hooked. A few years later, at fifty, she wanted to push herself even further. That’s when she signed up for her first marathon. One of her fellow sisters commented, “You’re such a free spirit. We don’t know how to contain you.” Sister Madonna thought to herself, “Why should you try to?” She completed the 26.2 mile race with a time of three hours and thirty-eight minutes at the age of 52.

“I just keep moving all the time. I run to church when I can. I literally run errands,” Madonna told me about how she keeps herself going.

Starting out in middle age allowed Sister Madonna to keep her body moving for the next forty years. Science bears out that good exercise habits in the middle of your life will lead to good exercise habits — and healthier bones and muscles — in later life as well.

“Starting an exercise program, or even just deciding to move more every day, is better than any drug that a doctor could prescribe.”

I recently came across an article in Outside that described how age is irrelevant to starting a good fitness routine. Nick Heil, the author of the piece, was staring down 50 and terrified of being relegated to sports that don’t require much sportiness: backgammon, bocce, cornhole.

After reading a half-dozen books on the subjects of aging and fitness, Heil writes, “I discovered that the key truly is ‘Use it or lose it.’” But there's also one twist, he says: “Don’t just use it — push it.” And by “push it” he doesn’t mean kill yourself, per se, but rather take on new challenges and new habits.

Heil cites Bill Gifford’s outstanding book, Spring Chicken, which delves into anti-aging science and what we can actually do about the fact that, every second of every day, we are all getting older.

I emailed Gifford to ask about that brutal truth, and he wrote back right away, a true sign of someone who refuses to give into letting things go as they age.

“It doesn’t matter,” he wrote, “whether or not you have exercised when younger; in fact, there is research showing that college athletes are often less healthy and fit in middle age, due to injuries they received when they were younger. Anecdotally, many of my 50-plus friends who were athletes in college are now going through painful hip replacements.”

“The main benefit of starting younger is that you’ve cultivated the habit of exercising,” Gifford clarified.” “It’s difficult to change habits as we get older. But starting an exercise program, or even just deciding to move more every day, is better than any drug that a doctor could prescribe.”

And so, with this wealth of advice and Sister Madonna’s story in my head, I have decided to both use it and push it. All of the training experts agree that the best way to get started on any kind of fitness routine — any serious kind of fitness routine — is to set a goal. And so I have decided to do my first triathlon at age 41.

I never thought I’d be gearing up for my first triathlon while heading into my fifth decade, but then there are a lot of things I never thought I would be doing in middle age. I didn't think I'd still be throwing nineties-themed keg parties with friends, or jumping out of airplanes, and those are both still in personal rotation. I imagined middle age as an endless loop of quiet dinners and game nights.

My decision was largely based on the fact that my husband and I both gained about 20 lbs of baby weight over the course of having two children and lost all of our willpower to work out. Now that those children are walking by themselves we figured we should get to it.

But we also wanted to make our goal fun. What’s the point of just doing a triathlon if you don’t actually enjoy it? So we booked a triathlon in Key West, Florida, in December, well into the part of the year when our hometown Philadelphia gets chilly and dreary.

The triathlon, an event that requires endurance more than speed or any particular skill, was a key choice in trying to lay my groundwork for better future physical fitness. Gifford explained to me that endurance and consistency are what you want to work on as you age.

“Basically, you want to be walking, running, cycling, or doing whatever, at a pace that you think you could sustain for a couple of hours if you had to,” Gifford said. “You’re not going hard, but you’re moving. A good guideline is to go at a pace where you can speak a complete sentence, but not an entire paragraph. This improves your mitochondrial function, and the ability of your body to burn both glucose and fats,” she told me.

Slow and steady wins the race. Of course the race we are talking about is our own personal future fitness levels. This triathlon isn’t about me beating anyone else. It’s not about me beating a personal best either. It’s about doing it and enjoying it and hopefully wanting to do another one in the future.

As I wrote these final words above I was reminded of another quote from Sister Madonna: “Heading to the finish line of the Iron Man is like me getting to the pearly gates. I think that is why I smile every time at the finish.”

Jo Piazza’s work has appeared in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Marie Claire, Glamour, and other notable publications. She is also the author of “Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win,” “How to Be Married,” “The Knockoff,” “Fitness Junkie,” and “If Nuns Ruled the World.” She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and two small children.

Are you overscheduled?

Among professional types, planning and calendaring can veer into obsession or at least high aspiration.

Case in point: “Many of us are desperate to know how other people spend their days, and why theirs seem so much more capacious than ours,” writes Rachel Syme in the New Yorker, where she coined the term “time voyeurism.”

That’s the phenomenon where people enjoy reading about the particulars of a successful person’s schedule.

You don’t have to look hard for examples. There’s the Sunday Routine in the New York Times. The Cut’s “How I Get It Done,” where powerful women walk you through their days. And of course, for years, business publications have put out features about someone’s morning routine, promising that doing things like waking up at 3 a.m. is the key to success.

Underlying all this seems to be a belief that if you could just manage your schedule the right way, you’d level up your life. Peak productivity unlocked. You’d get up early, exercise, meditate, make a smoothie with an obscure ingredient. You’d make more money, your kids would get better grades, you’d have better romantic relationships. Your skin would glow due to your well-established self-care routine.

With our long-term lenses on, we know the drive to perfect time management is often grounded in fantasy. Of course, you should use a calendar to keep track of your meetings and commitments. We’re not anarchists here at The Distance. But bottom line: Time management won’t save you, writes Dane Jensen, CEO of Third Factor and professor at the Kenan-Flagler School of Business, for Harvard Business Review.

Jensen explains that even if you manage your calendar well, and create more time for yourself, you will fill up that time with new tasks and become overwhelmed.

The result isn’t perfection or peak productivity, it’s burnout. For anyone in a field that requires even a modicum of creativity, that’s a death sentence.

“Time management promises us that if we become more efficient, we can make space to accommodate all of our to-dos comfortably,” Jensen writes. “And yet, time management is like digging a hole at the beach: the bigger the hole, the more water that rushes in to fill it.”

Jensen offers advice for simplifying your schedule and reducing what’s known as “cognitive load.” Reduce the number of decisions you need to make: Certain famous types always wear the same kinds of clothing, for example.

He also writes about establishing some principles for yourself that enable you to lessen the burden of decision-making. For example, if you’re trying to change your eating habits, make a rule that you won’t eat after 7:00 p.m. instead of vaguely promising to “eat healthier.”

For investors, such principles might be: Don’t look at your 401(k) balance when the market is going crazy.

For workplaces, maybe the key is a shorter work week? Look how this experiment in Iceland turned out — tldr, people earned the same amount of money for a four-day workweek and productivity DID NOT decline. Or perhaps just block off sections of your calendar to devote to deep work.

Write to us at The Distance and let us know your thoughts on time management.

What you're saying:

Distance readers are still sending over thoughts on Ben Walsh’s piece on trust and the marshmallow test. And some feedback from last week’s questions on robots taking your job.

Stephen Saucier: “I’d consider myself a prepper, with some long-term food supplies and the ability for my family live on our own for a few months. While that preparation could be characterized as a lack of trust in the broader system, the object of that mistrust isn’t other people’s decency but the fragile, just-in-time nature of global supply chains, and my acknowledgment of the possibility of a catastrophic event that could disrupt them.”

Aaron Floersch: “Yes, I would have definitely waited for the second marshmallow. I am very much a delayed gratification type. Always like watching balances grow. I weigh trust and skepticism against trying to be as intentional as possible. I always try to be cautiously optimistic, to trust but verify. ”

Issei: “I am in real estate, and one thing I’m very certain of — although there are many things that can be automated — is that there are waaaay too many variables in this industry for full mechanization. It’s hard to scale an automated system when there are so many shifting elements, unpredictable outcomes, and results that can negatively impact the businesses.”

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The Distance is supported by Fundrise, edited by Emily Peck and Alex Slotnick, and produced by Katie Valavanis and Brett Wilson, with help from Caitlin Daitch and Motasem Halawani. Our design director is Erin Culliney.