Everyone along the Peachtree Road Race course recognizes Betty Lindberg. After all, there aren’t many nonagenarians braving Atlanta’s heat on the Fourth of July, much less running a 10K in it.
Saturday, “Steady Betty” becomes a centenarian as she hits triple digits, and the Atlanta Track Club hopes you’ll send her birthday wishes via its social media sites: Instagram, Facebook and X, formerly called Twitter.
Lindberg started running at age 64, and this past July completed her 35th Atlanta Journal-Constitution Peachtree Road Race.
“Lindberg has established herself as a local running legend. At 91, she broke the world record in the 800-meter for her age group and set an age group world record of 55 minutes, 48 seconds at the 2022 Atlanta Publix 5K,” the AJC reported in 2022, after Lindberg finished her 33rd race in 2 hours and 15 minutes.
Lindberg was a tad slower this year, finishing in 3 hours and 8 minutes — a time many participants would have been thrilled with.
She was exposed to her first AJC Peachtree Road Race in 1988, when her daughter asked Betty and her husband, Lindy, to pick her up at the finish line.
“I had no idea what a road race was,” she told the track club last year. “Why are people getting up at the crack of dawn on the Fourth of July?”
But when she saw the runners smiling and waving, she told the track club, “I said, ‘I can do that; that looks like fun.’”
Now, daughter Kerry said, Lindberg swears after every race she’s never going to do it again.
“Absolutely not. I will not sign up for it. No, I will not,” Lindberg said. But she always does.
Keep an eye out July 4th, 2025, and maybe you’ll see Lindberg on Peachtree Street earning her 36th T-shirt.
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