Jeff Galloway, the much-loved
mentor of many American runners, who became a formative
figure in the running movement by his tireless promotion
of the sport and its life benefits, died on Wednesday
at the age of 80 from complications from a stroke and
brain bleeding, Runner’s World has learned.
As a runner of limited talent and limitless
dedication, Galloway embodied the idealism of the amateur
first running boom in the 1960s and 1970s. After becoming
what he called an “unlikely Olympian,” he
applied his teaching skills to his love of running, and
for more than 50 years he was ingeniously inventive in
finding ways to recruit, inspire, and educate runners.
He was a pioneer of the run/walk method, also known as
the “Galloway Method” or “Jeffing,”
which instructed runners to add walking intervals into
their runs.
Galloway founded running stores, running
groups, running camps, and running travel. He was involved
in creating important races, he was one of the sport’s
most sought after speakers, he wrote and marketed its
best-selling training book, and he continued to adapt
by moving into social media, podcasts, and race promotion.
With this record of innovation and his unequaled reach
into the running community, Galloway was probably the
most influential single contributor to the evolving running
movement in America. Yet he never lost his modesty, his
accessibility, or his generous impulse to teach. Many
of his followers and clients came to regard him as a personal
friend.
Born John F. Galloway (called Jeff), in
Raleigh, North Carolina, he was the son of a naval officer,
which made for a disrupted childhood. By 1958, in eighth
grade, he had attended 14 schools and was, by his own
account, an overweight kid with no sports experience who
was struggling academically. Trying cross-country, he
found that running could be “a boost to my spirit
and brain,” and “bestow a sense of hope,”
and he discovered the sport’s supportive group dynamics.
It took more than two years for him to show any talent,
although at Westminster Schools in Atlanta, Georgia, he
did eventually run a 4:28 mile and win a state high school
2-mile championship (9:48 at age 17).
Running helped him improve academically,
and he went on to Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
The lack of a high-pressure track program there brought
unexpected bonuses—the friendships of Amby Burfoot
and Bill Rodgers as cross-country teammates, opportunity
to train indoors at Yale with Frank Shorter, and the freedom
to compete on weekends in New England’s extensive
choice of road races. “I loved running road races,”
Galloway said, and that experience helped him become All-American,
improving on the track to a 4:12 mile, and 14:10 for 3
miles.
On graduation, at the height of conscription for the Vietnam
War, Galloway opted to sign for the officer program of
the U.S. Navy, and did active service for 18 months as
a gunnery officer off the coast of Vietnam. On brief shore
visits, his priority always was to run, as the best way
of relieving the stress of war zone service.
On completing three years’ service,
his aspiration was to become a teacher, but he also wanted
to test his potential as a runner, although he was still
not close to international standard. “I wanted to
see what I was made of,” he said later. He therefore
chose to enroll for a masters in social studies at Florida
State University, mainly for access to its good running
trails and opportunity to race with Shorter and Jack Bacheler
at the Florida Track Club in Gainesville. Galloway now
progressively increased his training until he was running
140 miles a week.
After 12 years of slow improvement, two years of that
rigorous regime (including sessions of 30 or 40 x 400m)
brought results. He won the inaugural Peachtree 10K Road
Race in Atlanta in 1970, a race he helped to create, and
at the Boston Marathon he placed 11th in 1971 (2:26:35)
and seventh in 1972 (2:20:03). This was still the era
of rigid amateurism, so Galloway survived by working part-time
in a sandwich shop.
Before the 1972 Olympic Trials in Eugene,
Oregon, Shorter arranged for Galloway and Bacheler to
join him for two months’ altitude training in Vail,
Colorado. Their dedication paid off, and in the 10,000-meter
trial, on a hot day, Shorter, Galloway, and Bacheler placed
first, second, and fourth, although Bacheler was controversially
disqualified for supposed interference as he staggered
exhausted around the last lap.
That was the prologue to a famous episode
in the Galloway legend. In the marathon trial a week later,
Galloway ran the entire distance with Bacheler in equal
third place, and then stepped aside at the finish to give
his friend the Olympic berth. Galloway thus became an
Olympian at 10,000 meters (where he did not reach the
final), not the marathon, where he would likely have placed
higher than Bacheler’s ninth.
Galloway went on to other successes: fifth
at Boston in 1973 (2:21:27), and American 10-mile road
record (47:49, 1973), travel with the U.S. track team,
a win and a second in the Honolulu Marathon (2:23:02,
1974, 2:19:54, 1975), and quality track PRs of 27:21 for
6 miles and 28:29 for 10,000 meters. At the 1976 Olympic
Trials, he improved his marathon to 2:18:29, but that
was now only good enough for ninth. He also married Barbara,
whom he had met as a track runner at Florida State, and
who later ran more than 160 marathons, and became an active
partner in his many running-related enterprises.
Those began with America’s first
speciality running store, Phidippides, in about 1973,
originally in Tallahassee, later moving to Atlanta. By
1978, there were 35 Phidippides stores nationwide. Galloway
built their success on making them full-service running
centers, providing different levels of training groups,
coaching, information, and simple socializing at the store
location. Increasing demand from new runners led him to
create the first Jeff Galloway Running Camps in 1975,
which were rebranded as Weekend Running Retreats.
Other top runners of that era contributed
in various creative ways to the growing running movement,
but Galloway was unique in the range of his innovations.
As the elite recruiter for the early years of Peachtree,
he steered that event’s evolution into one of the
world’s most competitive, as well as biggest, road
races. In 1978, he was among an Atlanta group who took
a proposal for an international women’s marathon
to the Avon Corporation, sparking the world-changing Avon
Running global circuit of women’s road races. In
1982, he opened running to yet another incipient recruitment
pool by setting up Atlanta’s Corporate Challenge.
He was also a longtime Runner’s World columnist,
training consultant for the Disney series of races, and
founder of a race pacing service.
Most influential of all were his books, more than 20 of
them, especially Galloway’s Book on Running (1984),
probably the best-selling running-coaching book of all
time. In the early years, he marketed it the hard way,
carrying copies to seminars and expos on a specially constructed
frame strapped on his back. Those who witnessed that quiet
persistence never begrudged his evolution into Galloway
Productions, Club Jeff, America’s Coach, Jeff’s
Store, and the other manifestations of the reach of his
mentorship.
Many revere him as the inventor and promoter
of the run/walk method (or Gallowalking), the simple legitimizing
of timed walk breaks that has enabled thousands to complete
long distance races without exhaustion or injury. That
idea was one of many that Galloway formed through his
continuing study of the science of running. Like other
truly great teachers, he was inspiring partly because
his material was so well researched, and because he was
so good at explaining the methods he advocated.
Part of his accessibility was his commitment
to family. He proudly helped his father, Elliott, become
a 2:58 marathoner at age 60, and his mother, Emma Katherine,
to be a Peachtree finisher into her 80s. Barbara Galloway
has her own books and her own race, Barb’s 5K, and
Brennan and Westin, their two sons, both contribute to
the multifaceted business.
A near-fatal cardiac episode in April
2021, at age 75, shocked many who regarded Galloway as
the ultimate role model for ageless daily running. He
quickly made it an opportunity to reaffirm lessons that
he learned as a novice high school cross-country runner
in 1958, that “running empowers you to overcome
challenges,” and that “what matters is not
what happens to you, but how you respond.”
Jeff is well known
to us "mature" runners. We met him at the Marine
Corps Marathon in 2003?? And I followed him in the early
years at Runner's World. It was a different magazine back
in the late 70s and 80's. His books were available at
all Running Room stores. John Stanton may have borrowed
some techniques from Jeff. He is dearly missed by the
running community.
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