“He Was a Man on a Mission”: Barb Galloway Reflects on 50 Years With Running Legend Jeff Galloway

In a deeply personal and unvarnished podcast interview, Barb Galloway has revealed the most important aspects of her 50-plus years with Jeff Galloway, who died on February 25 at age 80. They met on a running track at Florida State University. They parted when he developed a headache while chopping onions and carrots for dinner.

In between, they did a lot of “crazy things,” to use Barb’s own words. These included more than a few nights of sleeping in cars or airports while traveling to road races. “I told Jeff many times that it was a good thing he found me, because no other woman would have put up with the stuff he wanted to do.”

Barb also noted that Jeff was not an outwardly political man, but one shaped by important leaders from his home state, Georgia. He admired and tried to emulate Martin Luther King, Andrew Young, and Jimmy Carter, among others. He also learned many lessons from his father and grandfather, progressive educators in the South. 

In his competitive running years, Galloway made the 1972 Olympic team and won the first Atlanta Peachbowl Marathon (1963) and the first Peachtree 10K Road Race (1970). In the early 1970s, he opened what might have been the country’s first retail running store, Pheidippides, and began organizing road races. 

Later, he took his running/fitness message on the road, attending literally thousands of running clinics and talks. It was here that he honed the Run-Walk-Run program, also known as “Jeffing,” which inspired millions of new runners to take up the sport. His favorite word was “empowerment,” and his favorite phrase was “Be the captain of your own ship.”

Barbara was there every step of the way. “I knew what I was marrying into, and I loved it, I loved it. Jeff had a passion. He was a man on a mission, and I was ‘full steam ahead’ with him.”

Like her husband, Barb was a lifelong marathoner with a best time of 3:23:41 in the 1980 Houston Marathon. She and Jeff ran hundreds of marathons together in their widespread travels, perfectly content to finish in 5 or 6 hours as they got older. Sometimes they ran as little as 15 seconds at a time, followed by 15 seconds of walking. Jeff practiced what he preached. 

The Fast Track To Romance

A “closet runner and not one of the cool kids” in high school, Barb wanted to continue her running at FSU. One day, while jogging on the university track, she couldn’t help but notice a guy running fast intervals. 

He would start and stop each repeat next to a towel, where he was displaying an assortment of running shoes for sale. This was Jeff’s earliest retail effort.

Later, in Atlanta, she stumbled upon Jeff’s first real store and was soon hired as a part-timer. Jeff liked to say that their first date was a picnic he had prepared for the two of them. 

Barbara has a different memory: “He conned me into helping him tie-dye some t-shirts. The picnic was just something we did while the shirts were drying. All our other dates consisted of going to races.”

Jeff proposed to Barbara at one of those races — the 1975 Honolulu Marathon. He finished second in that event, but won her hand. “I said, ‘Of course.’ ”

A Man Of Incredible Patience 

Over several decades of their marriage, Jeff was on the road giving talks and clinics more than 200 days a year. He became famous not just for his Run-Walk-Run advice, but also for the way he would hold deep, eyeball-to-eyeball conversations with anyone seeking an audience or a selfie. 

The lines were often long. Minutes passed, sometimes hours.

“We totally missed our meals at some of those dinner speeches,” Barb recalled. “Once we were the last ones out of the building. We had to be helped out by the custodian. I probably wouldn’t have survived except for Power Bars.”

Jeff’s patience with runners seeking counsel became legendary. He seemed almost too good to be true. After all, 90 percent of the questions are the same day after day. “What should I eat before running?” “How many miles should I do on my long run?” “What do you think about stretching? (He was one of the earliest and sharpest critics.) 

You’d have to be a saint not to grow a bit tired of this routine. And yet Jeff never betrayed a moment of frustration or irritation. “I was at his side for 50 years, and I never heard him raise his voice to anybody,” Barb said.

Not even to those who, on anonymous internet message boards, criticized his Run-Walk-Run approach. They derisively referred to Galloway’s followers as “Gallowalkers.”

He might have called the critics “arrogant elitists” once or twice, Barb observed, adding that she advised him to curtail such language. “He knew that people didn’t understand him, but he didn’t dislike anyone. He thought people are who they are, and they have a right to their own opinions.”

The Pace Slows Down, But The Positivity Remains

In the first nine weeks of 2020, Jeff Galloway ran three marathons, all in the 5:30 to 5:45 range. His last was a 5:37:09 at Cowtown on March 1, 2020. Then came Covid, and the marathon world shut down.

In early 2021, he had a serious heart attack, caused, he believed, by the Agent Orange exposure he received during his Navy days in the Vietnam War. “The cardiologist responsible for Jeff’s care said that, judging by the clots in his heart, it was a miracle that he was still alive,” Barb said. “The cardiologist believed Jeff’s decades of running had literally remodeled his heart to provide more circulation.”

Recovery was slow and halting. While Jeff began walking 15,000 steps a day and more as soon as he could, he never regained his prior running fitness.

 “I jokingly told him, ‘You know, for 45 years I was married to an Olympian, and for five years I’ve been married to a disabled vet.’ He was like two different people in some ways, but he always had the same attitude: ‘We’re gonna deal with it, and keep marching onward.’ ”

Last fall, Jeff amped up his training, aiming to get in shape for the Honolulu Marathon. He wanted to become the first runner to complete a marathon in eight consecutive decades of his life, from his teens into his 80s. Things went well, and he got up to 21.5 miles in training, at about 16 minutes per mile. 

However, a week before Honolulu, he fell in a household accident, fracturing his kneecap. He was “absolutely devastated,” Barb admitted, but soon shifted his focus to upcoming events like the Disney World Marathon in early January. “His positivity never failed him. He truly believed he would live to be 100, and sometimes he said 120. And you know what? I think that’s a great way to think about your life.”

The dream ended when he developed a headache while helping Barb prepare dinner. He said he felt weak and nauseous, so Barb helped him settle into bed. Soon, he was sound asleep. “I thought it was a good thing that he needed some rest.”

How should Jeff Galloway be remembered? “He was a really nice man. I mean, a really nice man. And beyond that, beyond teaching the run-walk-run method, he also taught us about the power of listening to other people’s stories. 

“Everyone’s story is important. So get out there and run, share the run-walk-run method, tell your story, and listen to other people’s stories.”