Less than three months ago, on a cloudy December day, Jeff Galloway and I met on a dirt running path along the Chattahoochee River in Atlanta. The Olympic runner and creator of the run-walk-run method had spent most of last year training for a marathon. He hoped it would be his first since recovering from a heart attack a few years earlier.
As we set off on the path, he was only able to jog in 10-second intervals before walking for 30 seconds. But his delight in running at all was obvious in the way he glided forward. The intervals, he said, felt “perfect.”
Days later, Mr. Galloway broke his kneecap, and our run would turn out to be his last. On Wednesday, Mr. Galloway, 80, died after suffering complications of a stroke.
The day of the run, I was on assignment to profile Mr. Galloway and his planned marathon comeback. But the fact that I’m a runner at all is, in large part, because of Mr. Galloway’s relentless support for back-of-the-packers like me.
Mr. Galloway’s discovery that taking strategic walk breaks during runs could allow people of all fitness levels to accomplish otherwise insurmountable athletic feats has propelled me across three marathon finish lines. It has given me permission to call myself an athlete, despite my glacial pace, about 13 minutes per mile. Perhaps more important, it has taught me how to endure, both on and off the race course.
Like Mr. Galloway, I am an Atlanta native. Growing up in the 1980s and ’90s, I remember him as an ever-present hometown hero, preaching the joys of run-walking at his chain of specialty running shops, Phidippides. My dad, a proud middle-of-the-packer, would shake Mr. Galloway’s hand while buying shorts and Sauconys.
In the 1970s, Mr. Galloway had worked with the Atlanta Track Club to grow the city’s Peachtree Road Race. Back when most road races were staid affairs, he wanted to welcome more people into the sport by making the Peachtree feel like a party, with live music along the course. The race helped create the template for the modern urban road race, and it now draws more than 50,000 participants annually. I have been among them more than a dozen times. I didn’t realize until later how lucky I was to spend my earliest running years in a race culture that prioritized fun and inclusion.
Still, throughout my 20s, I ran the conventional way: without walk breaks. I was a slower runner even then, but I’d bought into the idea that walking was a sign of weakness. This was fine for 10Ks and even half-marathons, but after a series of injuries and a schedule that limited my training time, I felt like I’d hit a racing wall.
I asked my dad for advice, and he sent me a copy of Mr. Galloway’s book “Marathon: You Can Do It!” He also told me that if I trained for a marathon using the Galloway method, he would run the 26.2 miles with me.
During my training runs, I began doing intervals of 45 seconds of running and 30 seconds of walking. I found that I could travel further, and bounce back more quickly, than ever before. I began to see each long run not as one daunting push, but a series of manageable parts. In 2016, my dad and I crossed the finish line of the New York City Marathon together.
In the decade since, I have completed dozens more races using the run-walk-run method. The most profound gift that this has given me is the knowledge that I am someone who can keep going, even when the road ahead is not clear or I am riddled with doubt.
I have called on this endurance during health ordeals, like in 2018, after suffering an emergency C-section and premature delivery of my first son, and again in 2021, after losing a pregnancy in my second trimester. It has also carried me through less trying pursuits, like writing a book (a marathon if there ever was one).
Mr. Galloway helped hundreds of thousands of other people discover a similar belief in their own abilities, too. Lori Bierbrier, 55, began using Mr. Galloway’s online coaching programs during the pandemic, and would run with this voice in her ear. His magic, she told me, was his “kindness and humanity, and never a moment of condescension.”
While run-walker Jennifer Goddard, 69, was battling breast cancer, he coached her through her treatment and recovery. “His philosophy translated seamlessly to healing: Take it one segment at a time, trust the process, believe in the body’s resilience,” she said. “It is a mind-set of sustainability and hope.”
When I spent time with Mr. Galloway in December, I learned that his power as a coach and motivator came from a life spent testing his own ability to keep going. He had firsthand experience tapping into a private well of doubts, fears and setbacks, such as getting hit by a car in college, serving in Vietnam and surviving a heart attack.
Sitting at a dining table in his living room during my visit, I asked Mr. Galloway about the people who had influenced him the most. I was surprised when the first person he named was the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who believed that the key to happiness was finding meaning in suffering. Traversing long distances, Mr. Galloway said, offered an ideal vehicle for this search — regardless of whether you are at the front or back of the pack.
During our run-walk together in December, Mr. Galloway thanked me for slowing down to move at his pace. I assured him there was no need. He took in the wooded landscape, pausing to point out a deer. He was completely confident that he had at least one more marathon ahead of him, and said he had made peace with the fact that he might need to walk most or all of the course.
His goal, he said, was simply to keep moving forward for as long as he was alive.
The post Jeff Galloway Made Me a Marathoner appeared first on New York Times.
