Jeff Galloway, an Olympic distance runner who inspired hundreds of thousands of Americans to exercise by extolling the virtues of taking walking breaks during races — or “Jeffing,” as adherents called his signature method — died Feb. 25 in Pensacola, Florida. He was 80.
Mr. Galloway died in a hospital after suffering a stroke, his son Westin Galloway told The Washington Post.
Mr. Galloway described himself as an average runner as a teen who enrolled in his first marathon in Atlanta “because of the size of the trophy” and, by persistence more than talent, ascended to the U.S. Olympic team. For the 1972 Olympics in Munich, he qualified for the 10,000-meter race and was an alternate for the marathon. The next year, he set a U.S. record in the 10-mile road race.
Despite reaching the peaks of his grueling discipline, Mr. Galloway became most widely known for a training program with an everyman philosophy that spoke to reluctant runners and preached, of all things, walking.
Mr. Galloway began pioneering what he called a “Run Walk Run” technique — taking breaks to walk during training runs and even races — in the 1970s as he taught running to beginners. He championed the method as a way to reduce injury, control fatigue and, most importantly, motivate newcomers to “get off of the couch and run.”
Legions of new runners did just that. Mr. Galloway’s philosophy, espoused in books and an online training program, has reached more than a million people, his organization has said, and changed how athletes approach distance running.
Mr. Galloway had “the ability to empower runners, or people that didn’t even see themselves as runners,” his son Westin said, “giving them the space to be the athlete or the person that they never thought they could be through the benefits of exercise.”
John Franks Galloway was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, on July 12, 1945. His father was an educator and a sailor in the Navy; his mother worked at a private school in Atlanta that his father founded.
Mr. Galloway, who grew up in Atlanta, was not initially a prodigious running talent. He enrolled in a track conditioning program in eighth grade because his school required sports participation each quarter and the track coach was rumored to be the most lenient of the sports instructors, he wrote on his website.
“I can identify with the struggles of sedentary, overweight adults and kids, for I was one,” Mr. Galloway wrote.
Two months of running through forest trails got him hooked. Mr. Galloway qualified for the state high school championships in Georgia his senior year, then attended Wesleyan University, where he studied history and was an all-American runner.
Mr. Galloway served for three years in the Navy after college, a tour that sent him to Vietnam. Upon returning to the United States in 1970, he enrolled in graduate school at Florida State University with the goal of qualifying for the upcoming Olympics.
Even after years of training, it felt like a long shot, Mr. Galloway wrote. On a 90-degree summer day at the 1972 national championship in Seattle, he squeaked onto the 10,000-meter Olympic team in a close race — perhaps because he took it slow.
“Many of the runners had started too fast, and I did not,” Mr. Galloway recalled on his website. “I found myself catching up to the stragglers, passing one, then another.”
As a fitness boom took hold in the U.S. after the Munich Olympics, Mr. Galloway founded a running store, Phidippides, opened vacation fitness camps and wrote several books about running. “Jeffing,” or “the Galloway method,” became his most famous innovation.
At running clinics across the country, Mr. Galloway promoted his framework. Giving runners permission to take walking breaks while training encouraged beginners, he said, and the staggered runs could help even veteran marathoners improve their times. His charm and relentless focus on reaching novice runners set him apart from other instructors, Westin Galloway said.
“A lot of coaches were very focused on faster times and pushing people’s bodies to do the best that they could,” he said. “And he kind of looked at it from the other perspective of, running has an amazing way of changing a person’s life, and if he could get more people out there doing it, the world would be a better place.”
Mr. Galloway remained a fixture of the running community and continued to run and help organize races as he grew older. At 70, he ran the Marine Corps Marathon in Arlington in honor of a Marine killed in the 2015 Chattanooga, Tennessee, shooting at a Navy operations center. He returned to running after suffering a heart attack in 2021 that kept him hospital-bound for almost a month.
In the months before his death, Mr. Galloway had been fixated on run-walking another race at the age of 80. He had planned to run the Honolulu Marathon in December but fell and broke his kneecap. That didn’t discourage him, either, he told the New York Times in December.
“Doing another marathon, to me, feels like the strongest goal I’ve ever had in my life,” Mr. Galloway said to the Times.
Mr. Galloway is survived by his wife, Barb, 72; his sons Westin and Brennan; and six grandchildren. They are all runners, and Westin manages Mr. Galloway’s organization that continues to share his training program with runners around the world.
“Jeffing” has recently seen a renewed surge of interest, Westin Galloway said, as more people have taken up running since the coronavirus pandemic. Asked whether the influx of new adherents made Mr. Galloway proud, Westin demurred.
“He was happy talking to a single individual,” Westin said. “He didn’t care about numbers. He didn’t care about getting on the news or having big stories published about him. He cared about helping one person at a time.”
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