She started jogging a mile at 32. She will run her final Mini-Marathon Saturday at 80.
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GREENFIELD — The running began 48 years ago in a modest neighborhood in New Palestine. Betty Deer was a 32-year-old mother of two girls, a mother who, if truth be told, hoped a jog after dinner might keep those nagging extra five pounds away.
She set out from her driveway that first evening in 1974 and started jogging. A couple of neighbors spotted her and stopped Betty.
“Hey, we’d like to try running, too,” they told her.
At first, they kept it short, about a mile and a half from the end of the street down to Sugar Creek.
“And then we’d get down there and it was like, ‘Well now, you’ve got to figure out how to get back,'” said Betty. “How do we get back that mile and a half?”
That was Betty Deer at 32. On Saturday, she will run her 34th Mini-Marathon at 80, a race she has finished in the top three in her age division the past 13 years.
It will be a bittersweet day, an end of an era. Betty has run more than 12 full marathons and too many half marathons and shorter distance races to count.
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More than 50 medals hang in the den of her Greenfield home. Others are on the desk still wrapped in plastic. Many have been donated to sick kids at Riley Hospital for Children. Some have gone to Goodwill.
But on Saturday, Betty says she will cross the Mini-Marathon finish line one final time.
“I wouldn’t count on it,” her husband Larry Deer quickly chimes in. He can hardly believe his wife of 61 years would really give up marathoning. “I don’t think so. She might have another in her.”
No, Betty says adamantly. When she runs long distances, right hip pain nags at her. The foot pain is there, too, and even the Asics shoes she has sworn by for decades aren’t giving her relief.
“This will be my last,” she said. “It really will be my last.”
‘The way she runs? I had no idea’
Betty wasn’t a born runner. She wasn’t an athlete. She was raised in central Indiana, moving from farmhouse to farmhouse. Her parents were sharecroppers and Betty was the second oldest of their seven children.
There was work to do on the farms and girls playing sports, being athletes, wasn’t really a thing. Title IX wouldn’t pass for another 20 years. There was no track team, cross country team or any organized school girls’ teams, for that matter.
Betty did play some volleyball and there was the time in a gym class at Warren Central when she and some girls were playing basketball. Betty tried to take the ball down the court.
“Oh no, you can’t do that,” the gym teacher shouted out. “Girls only play half court games.”
After graduating from Warren Central in 1959, Betty met Larry. He had just returned home from playing three years of professional baseball, a long-armed, left-handed pitcher. He had been a 6-2 standout athlete at Arsenal Tech High, playing basketball, too.
One weekend night at a drive-in movie, Larry pulled up next to a car and looked over. Betty was in that car. They started talking. Then they talked some more. They were married June 18, 1960.
As Larry kissed his bride that day, he had no clue Betty would become this stellar athlete, a runner who traveled the United States for marathons and half marathons in places such as New York City, Cleveland, Las Vegas and Detroit.
“I never thought that she would ever do what she is doing,” said Larry, 84, who still lifts weights three days a week. “Running the way she runs? I had no idea. She had never run in her life.”
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But there was a good reason that she took to the pavement at 32, Betty said. By then, she had two daughters.
“We were doing it to maintain, to keep our weight down. I mean I was always dieting,” said Betty, who is just over 5-0 and 118 pounds. “You’d lose five pounds and put it right back on. And then as soon as I started running and kept at it, I’ve never had to diet again.”
‘I’m not fast.’ She is for her age.
The neighborhood jogs turned to running with co-workers after Betty clocked out at Community Hospital East, where she was a patient representative before going back to school to get a degree in social work.
“One of the ladies there said, ‘You know Shirley runs the Mini. Why don’t you do that?'” Betty said. “That’s how it began.”
It was 58 degrees, drizzling and overcast in May 1986. Betty drove to Indianapolis Motor Speedway where buses picked up runners and shuttled them downtown for the start of the race.
This was the 10th Mini-Marathon; the race began in 1977. It was Betty’s first. She finished that race with the best time of her 33 runs: One hour and 59 minutes.
She was hooked.
In the early days of the Mini, Betty ran the entire race.
“It was a mental thing in the beginning. I thought you had to run it,” she said. The only time she would walk was to grab a paper cup of water, drink it quickly, and then start running again.
“But now I find out that I do just as well if I walk some of it,” she said. On Saturday, she plans to run five minutes, walk 30 seconds, run five minutes, walk 30 seconds the entire race.
Her times have slowed as the years have passed. But it’s all relative. Betty remains at the top of her age group. At 64 years old, she finished fourth in her age group, running the Mini in 2:07. Every Mini-Marathon since, she has finished in the top 3.
In 2019, Betty placed first in the 75-79 age group with a time of 2:41:27, beating the next closest competitor by a full six minutes and the fifth place finisher by 32 minutes.
“But I’m not fast. I’m not fast,” she said. “See, I don’t consider myself a competitive runner.”
If not that, then what is she?
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‘I brag on her all the time’
As running goes, Betty has been lucky. At 80, she hasn’t had to have surgery on her knees or hip. She did have a thyroid issue and a couple of bouts with cataracts.
In the hundreds of races she has competed in, Betty has crossed the finish line every single time, though there was one Mini where she almost didn’t.
It was the 10th mile of the race when she broke the third metatarsal bone in her foot.
“I didn’t know what to do and I started walking, but it was painful,” she said. “And I decided, ‘Well, I might as well finish it.’ And so I started running and actually it felt better after I started running. And I finished that race.”
Betty doesn’t have any rituals for the Mini-Marathon, no carb-loaded spaghetti dinners with garlic bread the night before. “It just depends what I feel like eating that night,” she said.
In the morning, she usually has half a bagel with a smidge of peanut butter on the way to the race.
Her training consists of some type of workout six days a week. She runs three days, does spin classes and Pilates classes on two days and walks with a neighbor one day.
Betty saves her long runs for Sundays. To prepare for the Mini this year, she ran eight miles on Sundays in January, nine miles in February, 10 miles in March and 11 or 12 miles in April.
This week leading up to the Mini, she ran nine miles on Sunday, took a spin class and a Pilates class Monday and ran three miles Tuesday. She will rest until Saturday.
Larry, who worked for Kroger for 38 years, likes to tell anyone who will listen about his wife.
“I brag on her all the time at the gym, you know?” he said. “I say, ‘My wife is 80 years old and still running marathons.’ They say, ‘You’re kidding.'”
No, he’s not. Betty’s final marathon was in November, when she placed second in her age group at the Monumental Marathon.
Now to run her final Mini-Marathon.
“The thing I’ve enjoyed most is running with my friends,” Betty said. “If I’d stop running with them that would be devastating to me. So I’m going to keep running, just not to this level.”
More like those evenings running in her neighborhood in 1974 — when it all began.
Follow IndyStar sports reporter Dana Benbow on Twitter: @DanaBenbow. Reach her via email: [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Betty Deer will run her final Mini-Marathon in Indianapolis at 80
