Curious Jeff Is America's Running Coach

By Scott Benjamin

While it’s Curious George who is popular in the children’s books, it’s Curious Jeff who has built an empire from training adult runners as he’s made Run Walk Run a brand name.

“I read everything about running as a kid and it has continued,” Jeff Galloway said. “I’ve always been peppering people with questions about running and training.”

The list is longer than a marathon, and has featured Bill Rodgers and Amby Burfoot, his former Wesleyan University teammates who combined to win five Boston Marathons; to his late friend Geoff Hollister, who was the number three man at Nike; to the late Oregon coach and Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman, who coached him in the 10,000 meters at the 1972 Munich Olympics; to the late sports physician George Sheehan.

Galloway, who at age 71 sports a slim, athletic build with tapered legs, spends about two-thirds of the year hosting running schools, retreats and races where he underscores the value of Run Walk Run, where the distance runner alternates between running and walking to reduce stress and remain injury free. He started using it 38 years ago and hasn’t had an injury since. He also manages a small chain of running stores.

He attributes part of his success not just to running for the late Elmer Swanson, the noted Wesleyan coach, but what he learned in the classroom on the Middletown campus.

“At a small, liberal arts school, you get immersed in cognitive learning where you have to solve problems and isolate issues that need to be analyzed,” said Galloway, who majored in History. “You can get that at other schools, but you usually have to search for it. At Wesleyan, it was part of the culture. You were challenged to solve a problem by determining where you are now and where you wanted to get to.”

He said in a phone interview that the start of his writing career – he has published more than 20 books, which have sold more than 1 million copies, and contributes a monthly column to Runner’s World – came at Wesleyan, where one semester he wrote 200 pages for his various class projects.

Galloway said that he was “not very good” while in high school and didn’t qualify for the Georgia state championships until his senior year when he captured the two-mile title.

But from the get-go he “loved running and the social aspect of the sport.” Today, he communicates with about 100 runners a day, mostly by e-mail. He held one of his three-hour running schools recently in Brookfield.

There were a handful of youth running camps and none for adults when he launched his first retreat in 1975. He has continued to specialize in training adults in large numbers, never having the time or interest to focus on training a world-class distance runner.

He said the biggest change since about 1985 has been the influx of women.

Galloway said that over that time probably “60 to 70 percent” of the new runners have been women. Several of the mothers who run have brought their children into the sport. He said, generally speaking, most female runners are mentally stronger than their male counterparts.

He said he agrees with the late Joe Concannon, the longtime Boston Globe sportswriter who hailed from Litchfield, that Rodgers, who won the Boston Marathon and the New York City Marathon four times each, has a charisma that elevated running in the 1970s in a way that the late Arnold Palmer made golf more visible through the 1950s and early 1960s.

“I think a lot of people were inspired by his running,” Galloway said. “Bill has come to my race in Atlanta and people tell him and they tell me that they became runners because of him.”

Unfortunately, Rodgers’ impressive resume doesn’t include a gold medal in the Olympic Marathon. He struggled with an injury at Montreal in 1976 and America boycotted the 1980 Moscow Games following the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.

Frank Shorter, a former Yale standout, won the Gold medal in 1972 at Munich, when America placed its three marathoners in the top nine places. It had been 64 years since an American marathoner had won at the Olympics. Galloway, who was in third place at the U.S. trials earlier that year after already qualifying for the 10,000 meters, allowed his Florida Track Club teammate Jack Bacheler to pass him to take the third, and final, qualifying position on the U.S. marathon team. Bacheler, who had narrowly missed making the American team in the 10,000 meters, then finished ninth in the marathon at Munich.

Shorter took a silver medal at Montreal four years later, the best that American has done since then. Galloway was training 140 miles a week at altitude in Arizona when he came down with bronchial pneumonia eight weeks before the 1976 trials. He was held back to limited training five weeks later and still finished ninth at the trials.

He said Galen Rupp’s bronze-medal finish this summer at Rio should bode well for the future.

“It is bound to give a boost to runners who aspire to make the American Olympic marathon team,” Galloway said. “In this country the Olympics is track & field’s main area of visibility. It is the World Series, Super Bowl and NBA Finals combined.”

He added, “With what’s now happening, we’re seeing that we’re not afraid to challenge the Africans as was the case in the 1980s and 1990s.”