Indianapolis, Southern Ohio bishops complete New York Marathon together

[Episcopal News Service] Nov. 2 was a day of two significant and related “firsts” for Indianapolis Bishop Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows.

It marked the first time in 37 years that Baskerville-Burrows had not been in a church for the Sunday observance of the Feast of All Saints. The reason: The bishop, a longtime runner who grew up in New York City, had spent the day completing her hometown’s world-famous marathon for the first time.

And she did it with a close friend, Southern Ohio Bishop Kristin Uffelman White, who also was completing her first New York Marathon. Both bishops finished the 26.2 miles together in a run-walk time of 8 hours and 46 minutes.

“To me, the victory was getting to the start line healthy,” Baskerville-Burrows, 59, told Episcopal News Service in an interview this week, after she had returned to Indiana. “The race was the victory lap.”

Baskerville-Burrows and White first became co-workers, then friends and then running buddies when they served together in the Diocese of Chicago. After Baskerville-Burrows was consecrated bishop of Indianapolis in 2017, White joined the diocese the following year as Baskerville-Burrows’ canon to the ordinary for congregational development and leadership. White was elected bishop of Southern Ohio in September 2023 and took office the following February.

White told ENS in a separate phone interview that she has long been inspired in the sport by Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, The Episcopal Church’s former presiding bishop, a fellow runner who described running as a form of prayer.

“That’s how I experienced my training,” she said, “and it has been a gift of our friendship that Bishop Jennifer and I like running together.”

White, at 54, has somewhat more marathon experience than Baskerville-Burrows. The Southern Ohio bishop ran her first 26.2-mile race in 2006. She had just turned 35, was living with her family in Oregon and wanted to “do a big thing” before going to seminary. The annual marathon in Vancouver, British Columbia, seemed to fit the bill, and she succeeded in taking it on.

She didn’t expect to run that far ever again, but five years later, she added the 2011 Chicago Marathon to her list of running achievements.

Baskerville-Burrows said she has run off and on since college but focused more on triathlons over the past 15 years. She also ran the Chicago Half Marathon in 2013, raising money for Episcopal Relief & Development. Then after COVID-19 hit in 2020, she and White began discussing the idea of running a marathon together.

The prestigious Boston Marathon, typically difficult to enter because of its qualifying times, announced that it would allow anyone to sign up for the race in 2021 if they chose the “virtual” option — meaning some official entrants could chart their own 26.2 courses wherever they were.

For that race, Baskerville-Burrows and White were joined by Brendan O’Sullivan-Hale, the Diocese of Indianapolis’s canon to the ordinary for administration and evangelism, and the Rev. Theodora Brooks, a priest in the Diocese of New York. They plotted a course around Indianapolis that roughly mirrored the Boston Marathon’s elevation changes.

Their virtual Boston was the first marathon for Baskerville-Burrows and the third for White.

Then in 2024, in the days leading up to that year’s in-person Boston Marathon, Baskerville-Burrows, though not running the race, spoke at a pre-race event on the topic of running and diversity. Representatives from New York Road Runners, the nonprofit that organizes the New York Marathon,  spoke to her afterward and were surprised to learn she had never run her hometown marathon.

She had a good professional excuse — “the marathon was always on a feast day” — but she also was drawn to the idea of running through some of the boroughs and neighborhoods where she once lived, went to school and experienced growing up in the big city. One of the New York Road Runners employees made her an offer: Baskerville-Burrows would still have to pay the entry fee, but the employee had an extra couple passes, so she and White wouldn’t have to pursue one of the other common avenues for gaining entry.

On race day, Baskerville-Burrows and White found themselves on a bus ride at 6:30 a.m. over Baskerville-Burrows’ “favorite bridge,” the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, to the starting line in Staten Island, the borough where she lived as a child. After waiting a few hours for their wave start, Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” gave them and thousands of other runners the race’s traditional sendoff.

For the bishops’ inspiration, White read aloud Hebrews 12:1: “Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us.” She and Baskerville-Burrows carried that passage with them as they began putting one foot after the other through all five boroughs, with their sights on the finish line in Central Park.

By the final miles, their run-walk plan had evolved into mostly walking. The race was challenging but not daunting, Baskerville-Burrows said, and “the best part was going through neighborhoods I grew up in.” They also were encouraged by the many New Yorkers cheering from the sidelines and the perseverance of the 59,000 other runners who made it through the whole course.

“It was really wonderful reminder of the deep goodness of humanity,” White said.

– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.