Jeff Galloway

Jeff Galloway died on February 25, 2026. Galloway was a long-distance runner who developed a marathon training plan that used walking breaks to make it easier to finish a marathon.

Before I ran my first marathon in Chicago in 1989, I bought Galloway’s Book on Running and used one of the several training programs, probably one aimed at a 3:45 finish time. I remember doing long runs in the fall along the shore of Lake Michigan from Hyde Park north past the museums and back. The race that year was very warm, and I hit the wall but still finished under four hours.

Galloway’s run-walk-run approach introduced regular walking breaks into marathon training programs and even into marathon races. When I was relatively young, I would run one mile and walk for one minute during my long runs.

Most marathon training programs cap the long training run at twenty miles for fear of injury, but Galloway’s plan recommended training runs of 26, 28, or even 30 miles using the run-walk-run approach. In 1994, when I ran my fastest marathon in Portland, Oregon, my longest run was 30 miles in St. Louis’s Forest Park on the six-mile loop there. That training run paid off; my marathon in Portland was the only marathon I’ve run where I didn’t need to walk.

I used Galloway’s program to train for thirty-some marathons (I don’t have an exact count), including the Boston Marathon in 2016.

As I got older, I increased my walking breaks to one minute every six minutes. I ran my last marathon, a virtual marathon, at age 66 in 2020 during the Covid pandemic, using the run-walk-run approach.