Jeff Galloway has run more than 230 marathons. He was a member of the US team at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, has a 10km personal best of about 28 minutes and he has been a running coach for more than 50 years. But perhaps the 79-year-old’s greatest achievement is creating the run-walk method known as “Jeffing” that can be practised by beginners and experienced runners alike.“Firstly, I must say how proud I am to be a verb,” says Galloway, before explaining that the idea goes back to 1973. “I was encouraging beginners to run, but they were suffering all types of aches and pains. I then realised that even world-class athletes need to warm up properly. They start at low intensity with a jog and then speed up to get the blood flowing.“So, I took that pace-shifting template and applied it to a group of 22 people with an average age of 42. We started off walking, flowed into a jog and then walked again. We followed that pattern and at the end of the 10-week programme, every one of the 22 had finished either a 5km or a 10km. That was great in itself, but I then realised none of the group broke down with injury. I’d never before trained a group of runners where at least one hadn’t been injured.”Galloway says he has not had an injury himself since 1978. He believes that his walk-run strategy is more “natural” than non-stop efforts. “According to anthropologists, while humans were designed for long distances – up to 5,000 miles during the earliest migrations – we weren’t designed for non-stop running. It’s not inherently in our DNA to run continuously, which is why many individuals break down.