JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Jeff Galloway was an Olympian. He ran the 10,000 meters for the U.S. in 1972 in Munich, but he is better remembered for what he did after that. As a coach, author, small business owner, race promoter and general running evangelist, he led millions of people to discover the sport at quite literally their own pace. Jeff Galloway died last week at the age of 80. His longtime friend, Amby Burfoot, is the former editor of Runner's World and joins us now. Hi.
AMBY BURFOOT: Hi. Great to be with you.
SUMMERS: Great to have you, and I'm so sorry for the loss of your friend.
BURFOOT: Well, thank you. It has actually hit quite hard, being a contemporary, essentially the same age as I am and someone who I - as I like to say, I ran a million miles with Jeff in college, and we've been very close ever since.
SUMMERS: I mean, I think Jeff Galloway is a household name for so many of us, including myself, who are runners. But how would you sum up his impact on running here in the United States?
BURFOOT: Well, I think his impact was greater than any of us perhaps realized until his passing. And we have seen the outpouring of expressions of love and thank you from so many people who benefited from his help. Jeff was what I would call the community organizer of running. He was out there almost every day talking to everyday people, to more people than any of us ever imagined.
SUMMERS: I want to talk for a moment about his most famous innovation, or, I guess, I'll say the thing that he became known for, which is that he encouraged people to take walking breaks during their runs to pace themselves. And this was something that Jeff Galloway even did himself as an elite marathoner. Talk to us about that.
BURFOOT: Hey, I was once an elite marathoner, and I've been taking walking breaks for 25 years now. We all have to adjust to where we are in life and our fitness and our physical strengths and weaknesses. What's really important about the run-walk message is that Jeff persisted with it when people kind of ridiculed him at the beginning. It was stupid for them to do it, but people called it gala walking. And people said, well, if you're walking, you're not really running. Running 26 miles is impossible for just about anyone (laughter) if you ask me. But if you put a little walking in there as needed, it suddenly becomes something that can be achieved.
SUMMERS: Where did this come from, this desire to really evangelize running to people who are not hardcore endurance athletes, just, like, regular people?
BURFOOT: I think it came from his father, who was an educator and started a private school in Atlanta. And Jeff, in a sense, started this Galloway school of running. He just wanted to help people improve their lives mentally and physically. He realized other people were not going to become Olympians like him or even Boston marathon qualifiers. What's important is your own personal health and your ability to believe in yourself and to achieve something really remarkable at your own pace. And that's what he gave people.
SUMMERS: I mean, there are a lot of elite athletes out there who are happy to be done with their sports after their time at the top of their games, but that was not Jeff Galloway. He publicly wanted to run a marathon in eight consecutive decades.
BURFOOT: Well, Jeff and I were going to go to Honolulu in December and run the Honolulu Marathon, which would have been his eighth decade of running marathons. I'm at seven decades. I always wanted Jeff to be the first. He deserved to be the first. I'm so sorry that he couldn't run Honolulu and, of course, devastated by his recent passing.
SUMMERS: Author and journalist Amby Burfoot remembering a fellow running enthusiast, Jeff Galloway. Thank you so much.
BURFOOT: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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