At 89, she’s still running

At 89, she’s still running; Turkey Trot is next
Dayton Daily News
By Tom Archdeacon, Staff Writer (Photos by Jan Underwood)
Sunday, November 21, 2010

BEAVERCREEK — She’s the woman who put the skirt — a little red mini-skirt, to be exact — on local running.

But before that happened — like any person with a sense of fashion or fitness — Millie Bolton worked on her legs.

Back in the mid 1960s, she would regularly take her four children to the Xenia YMCA for swimming lessons.

“It was kind of boring just waiting there, but then I started seeing all these men who were pretty fit and trim come in carrying gym bags,” she said. “They’d change into shorts and go out running.

“I thought that’d be something to take up my time — and get my legs in shape — while I waited, but I never saw any women run.”

She found out the Y was starting a program to get men to log 100 miles of running in three months. If any woman wanted to try it, she was told they’d lower the limit to 50 miles.

“At first I was the only woman,” Bolton said. “When I started running in our neighborhood, dogs would bark and the neighbors wondered, ‘What’s she running from?’

“I’m pretty competitive and I wasn’t going to let the men outdo me, so I ran 100 miles in those three months, too.”

A few years later she said she saw a newspaper story about a local race that was accepting women: “I got up enough nerve to sign up. I was the only lady who ran, so they gave me a trophy — except it had the figure of a male runner on the top. That’s all they had.

“The first thing I did when I got home was put a little red skirt on him. When people saw it, I wanted them to know women run, too.”

That award from long ago still is displayed on the top shelf of the completely-filled trophy cabinet she has in a corner of the dining room of her Beavercreek home.

But the other afternoon the room’s real trophy — with her white curls, her blue eyes and her animated ways — was standing next to the dining room table, leafing through an over-stuffed scrapbook laid out in front of her and giving enthusiastic remembrances of each event chronicled there.

Bolton is tiny — “5-foot-2 if I stretch” — but she stands much taller. She is proof of the old adage about age being just a number.

She’s 89, but acts like she’s 39.

She runs daily, takes an aerobics class and is a member of the Kettering Senior Show Choir. She also is an active member of St. Luke’s Catholic Church on Fairfield Road.

She attends daily Mass, passes out communion in nursing homes, is part of the church’s bereavement team and is an active member of St. Luke’s leisure club.

She has season tickets to the opera, travels for pleasure — Rome, the Holy Land — and competes across the nation in the Senior Olympics.

“The way I see it, some people are old at 60 and some are young at 80,” she said. “I don’t see myself as old and I try not to act it.

“If you sit in a rockin’ chair and just rock, you’re done. I try to keep active. I can even do a jig, I dance all the time in my house. I figure if you don’t keep groovin’, you won’t be movin’.”

Triumph and tragedy

She was raised on a farm outside Fort Recovery where her dad — “as German as sauerkraut” — was a no-nonsense guy.

After graduating from high school in 1940, she came to Dayton to find a job and be with a boyfriend — the former, at first, working out better than the latter.

She held various jobs — including working on a grinding machine at Delco during the war — and eventually met Lou Bolton, a former All-City football player at Chaminade. They married and had three sons and a daughter.

Soon after she became something of the Pied Piper of local women runners. She helped launch a women’s running club — the Fun Runners — and members kept mileage logs, had picnics, parties and even sponsored races of their own.

She became active in the Seniors Olympics — running everything from the 100-meter dash to the mile —  and her continued success led to her induction into the Ohio Senior Olympics Hall of Fame.

One of the most poignant moments of her life came at the National Senior Olympics in Baton Rouge in the mid-1990s.

“By 7:30 that morning it already was beastly hot and I was running all the events and after a while I didn’t think I could finish,” she said. “But my son Greg was there and so was my daughter Mary Lou and I wanted to finish for them.

“Then all of a sudden I hear this voice ‘Go Mom! Go!’ It was Mary Lou ... so I put on the jazz and ended up getting the gold medal.”

As she finished the story, her eyes began to glisten.

Mary Lou was a prosecuting attorney in Phoenix and the one child to really follow in her mom’s footsteps. At 4-foot-11, she mountain biked, roller bladed and ran daily.

“Her routine was to get up at 5 a.m., do her running, shower and go to the office,” Millie said quietly.

“One morning she got to the office and she was coughing and a Benedictine nun who works next door heard her. She walked in to check on ‘Lil’ Mary Lou’ as she called her and saw her head go down on her desk. She took her in her arms and prayed over her.”

Just 44, Mary Lou died of an aneurysm.

“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with,” Millie said as tears began to spill. “I wasn’t there to take her in my arms myself, but a nun holding her as she passed, what more could I ask for?

“Mary Lou was always very proud of me. She was the one who kept me going that day in Baton Rouge. That’s why I’ve tried to keep my running going. I’ve got to do it for her.”

Guided by faith

Millie will be doing just that on Thanksgiving Day when she competes in the 32nd annual Turkey Trot in Miamisburg. With a 5-mile run and a 1-mile walk, it’s one of the most anticipated — and fun — sporting affairs in the Miami Valley.

Race publicist Joe McLaughlin said the event — which begins at 8 a.m. from the Baum Opera House in Miamisburg — attracts close to 8,000 participants. The field includes serious runners, leisurely walkers, families and, of course, a cast of characters in costumes.

Millie may well be the oldest participant.

When she competed at the National Senior Games at Stanford University last year, she was the oldest woman running in her events. It likely will be the same at the 2011 Games in Houston where she’s qualified at 800 and 1,500 meters.

Yet against all the success, she made a surprising admission:

“I’m not that crazy about running. But I know what it does for me. It helps keep me fit. I love life. I want to be around as long as I can and I want to stay independent.

“Part of it is having good genes, but it’s how well you take care of yourself, too. It’s also what kind of attitude you have. Personality has a lot to do with it and I’m not a sourpuss. And most important, I think, is your faith. It guides me through everything. And with the Lord’s help, I’ll be able to keep going.”

And this time of year, she’s especially active.

“Our choir is singing at nursing homes, for children’s groups and at clubs. During the holidays, we have all kinds of gigs.

“Us women in the group, we wear red blouses with a sort of string tie and we have rhinestone vests. We’re real sparkly.”

And just like that red mini-skirt, it’s all part of a wardrobe for a gal who keeps groovin’ so she can keep movin’.