One enjoyable recurring thread in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Peachtree Road Race is the personal stories of runners who return year after year. One who has become something of a local legend is 99-year-old Betty Lindberg, who shared her story with the AJC ahead of Thursday’s race.
“I cannot think of a Fourth of July and there’s a Peachtree Road Race being run, I feel like I have to get up and do it,” Lindberg said in the video that is part of this story.
Growing up in Minnesota in the 1920s, Lindberg said girls were discouraged from running competitions. It just wasn’t done, and “I just accepted it,” she said. Around 1988, after watching family participate in the Peachtree, she got a notion to train for it. That’s why she took up running at age 64.
Just shy of her 100th birthday, she has now trained for her 35th AJC Peachtree Road Race. Watch her story to learn how she “accidentally” set a record when she was 91, meet some members of her “Team Betty” supporters and hear in her own words what keeps her running — even when she jokes that every year, at about mile 4 of the 6.2-mile race, she vows she’ll never do it again.
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