DEL.ICIO.USFor Galloway, father’s memory will be in race all the way
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Jeff Galloway’s game plan for the 40th Atlanta Journal-Constitution Peachtree Road Race in no way resembles the one he used to win the first.
All those years ago, Galloway ran against things — the clock, the field, the next hill. He was just beginning to build a legacy with his legs, one that grew to include a place in the Olympics, a network of running schools and stores and a reputation as one of the sport’s great ambassadors.
File photo
Past Peachtree Road Race winners Gayle Barron and Jeff Galloway talk before an awards ceremony. Galloway and his wife will salk at certain prearranged points of this year’s race to honor his father, who died the afternoon of July 4, 2008, after dropping out part way through the morning event.
• Jeff Galloway won the first Peachtree Road Race in 32:21.6. Ethiopia's Terefe Maregu won last year's race in 28:30. Kenya's Joseph Kimani holds the Peachtree record of 27:04, set in 1997.*
• Galloway is one of 13 American men to win the Peachtree. No American has won the race since Ed Eyestone in 1991. Other nationalities to win Peachtree: Kenya (16), Ethiopia (2), Morocco (2), Ireland (2), Belgium (1), Mexico (1), South Africa (1), Tanzania (1).
*Course configurations have changed throughout the years
AJC PEACHTREE ROAD RACE 2009 PHOTOS
- Bradley: The cheaters burn me up
On Saturday, he’ll be running for something — solace. And for someone — his late father, who died just hours after last year’s race.
Galloway, 63, and his wife will slow down to walk at certain prearranged points, as his father did in his later Peachtree races. At each mile, they will invoke the memory of Elliott Galloway, be it through a favorite quote or a treasured family anecdote. It will be a moving tribute, literally.
The computer chip attached to his shoe will record an extraordinarily slow time for a senior runner of Jeff Galloway’s stripe. His heart will measure Saturday far differently.
“It will be an intense time, probably as intense, in a different way, as winning the race,” he said.
For all the other happy ways the Peachtree is a part of Galloway, it now and forever also marks the death of his father.
A year ago, while Jeff and his wife, Barbara, were in Oregon watching the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials, Elliott started his 35th Peachtree at the age of 87.
The same determination the senior Galloway put into founding the private, progressive Galloway School in Sandy Springs, he had invested in his running. And the Peachtree Road Race was one of his favorite challenges, even
as the drag of age increased.
“He’d walk it and run it. It took him an extremely long time to finish, but it was a wonderful experience,” Jeff Galloway said. “He got more cheers than I did.”
In 2008, though, something was not right with Elliott. Early in the world’s biggest 10-K race, he pulled out. Telling friends he felt drained, he caught a ride home.
After a long nap, feeling better and a little guilty for cutting his run so short, Elliott stubbornly decided to go out and try again. Just a few hundred yards from his home, he fell, hitting his head on the sidewalk.
A neighbor saw Elliott down and disoriented and took him to the hospital. Helpless, all his son could do was monitor the situation long-distance.
Elliott Galloway died that afternoon of a brain hemorrhage.
The Galloway name is woven into the fabric of Atlanta’s road race. What Washington is to presidents and Armstrong is to moon-walkers, Jeff Galloway is to the Peachtree. He was the first, an original, at the lead among the mere 110 runners who had the bright idea in 1970: “Hey, let’s run six miles or so in the stifling height of an Atlanta summer.”
His is a name also closely bound to the activity of running as a whole. A 10,000-meter competitor in the 1972 Olympics, Galloway came back home to build a specialty running store (Phidippides, with two locations in the Atlanta area) and a standing as a leading trainer and author.
Half the year he travels around the country, lecturing, teaching, proselytizing on the benefits of taking to the streets. By popularizing the concept of interspersing walking with running — whatever it takes to make the distance — Jeff Galloway has put a whole new segment of people in running shorts.
To all that, there is the tragic footnote of his father dying on the day of the race that Galloway helped launch, doing the very thing that is Galloway’s passion.
“The Peachtree was special to Dad,” Jeff said.
But it won’t be just his father Jeff is thinking about throughout the Peachtree. The Galloways owe great parts of their heritage to this race, just as the race owes much of its beginnings to them. They run the Peachtree, and the Peachtree runs through them, three generations worth now (Jeff’s two sons are out of town, unable to join their parents Saturday).
For instance, there is the story of Jeff’s mother, Kitty, who finished the 2005 Peachtree shortly after being diagnosed with the lung cancer that would claim her early in 2006. She faltered midway through that race, sitting on the curb near the top of “Heartbreak Hill” in front of Piedmont Hospital.
But she found her second wind in defiance of a race worker who tried to escort her off the course. Rising to her feet, Kitty struggled on to the finish.
“I really will be running this one celebrating both my father’s life and my mother’s life,” Jeff said.
“My mom was an inspiration to us all.”
Running defines the spirit of this family. During visits to Greece, several of them ran the ancient course from Marathon to Athens. In London, Elliott and one of his two grandsons retraced Chaucer’s epic trail from London to the cathedral in Canterbury. Jeff ran the Boston Marathon in 1996 with his father, then 75 — “My favorite marathon of the 144 I’ve run,” Jeff said.
Jeff’s wife, whom he met — where else — at a track meet in Florida, ran with Elliott on several of his later Peachtrees.
In the almost evangelical way Jeff went about his business, he saw it as a natural continuation of his father’s work as an educator.
“What my dad really was doing was helping people improve the quality of their lives,” Jeff said. “And that’s what I feel I’m doing.”
“The first family of running in the city,” the Peachtree’s now-retired matriarch Julia Emmons once dubbed the Galloways. Certainly, no family could have a more intimate relationship with the sport, having shared with it every sentiment from exhilaration to sorrow.
A wish Elliott expressed with increasing frequency as he grew older was that, if he could choose a way to die, it would be to simply collapse while hoofing it up a hill. Those words have echoed often through the last year, comforting his family and friends and securing their relationship with running.
“We’re selfish. We wish he was still around,” Jeff said. “Bottom line, he did go out the way he wanted to.”
If anyone could understand Elliott’s view of the running life and death, it would be Herb Benario, now 80, a retired Emory professor who often ran with him in Atlanta Track Club events.
When Benario heard of his friend’s death, “I thought how lucky he was,” he said. “He died doing what he liked. I can’t think of a more satisfying end. Better than having a stroke, getting Alzheimer’s, not being the
person you once were.
“He had gotten a good deal older — we all do — but he still was the Elliott Galloway that thousands of people admired.”
At his father’s insistence, Jeff began running as a pudgy eighth- grader at the Westminster School.
And at his son’s prodding, Elliott began running in his early 50s, shortly after Jeff returned from the Olympics. His father had grown sedentary and heavy, but would lose 50 pounds in the process of becoming a dedicated distance man.
When Elliott ran/walked, it often was a one-person contest of will. It never was said he ran simply for the joy of it.
“He always was trying to get out of his body whatever was there,” said Barbara Galloway. “That never changed, to the day he died.”
Jeff has abandoned the
competitive aspect of
distance running. When he puts in his 35 miles or so a week, it often is at — for him — a reasonable pace.
But for weeks after Elliott died, Jeff took to the road and explored his physical limits just as his father always had. He was in great need of release.
“As soon as I could [after the funeral], I went out to the trail on Cochran Shoals [along the Chattahoochee River] and ran myself to total exhaustion. I ran faster and harder than I had in years,” Jeff said. “I kept going back there and doing that.”
With each hard breath, a little more grief was vented. As he likes to say, “Running allows you to release emotion.”
Running never has been the cause of his pain; it has been a treatment.
It’s always there for the Galloways, whatever the need. It will be there again on the morning of the Fourth.
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