Almost every day, Justine Galloway laces up her running shoes and heads out to do some miles along San Diego’s Mission Bay. The sky is almost always sunny, the water almost always blue.

And as Galloway runs, she almost always hears the same things:

“Hey! You’re running the wrong way!”

And, well, technically, she is running the wrong—or at least a different—way. Galloway is running backwards. She understands it’s a peculiar sight, but still, she gets a little tired of the constant commentary.

“One of these days, when someone says, ‘You’re running the wrong way!’, I’m going to stop, turn around, start running the other way, and be like, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t know! I’ve been running this way forever, I’m so glad you told me,’” she says with a laugh. “I haven’t done it yet, but one of these days.”

Galloway, a 44-year-old biomedical engineer, runs backwards because she has runner’s dystonia (RD), a mysterious neurological issue that breaks a link between the brain and the body. It’s akin to the “yips,” when golfers suddenly can’t sink a putt, or the “twisties,” when gymnasts suddenly can’t land a flip.

For Galloway, having RD means her body has somehow forgotten how to run. When she runs backwards, it changes her brain signals. She’s back to running marathons and doing triathlons, even making it into the Guinness Book of World Records and serves as a resource for Kara Goucher–a retired two-time Olympian and world silver medalist who also has runner’s dystonia. But Galloway’s journey to getting the diagnosis and finding out how to run again hasn’t been an easy one.

“Most of the time when I run backwards, people will be like, ‘Why are you running backwards?’ And I say, ‘I have runner’s dystonia,’” she says. “We were doing a triathlon and this person kept on giving me dirty looks every time we ran next to each other. And then she finally asked me at the end of the race, and then she’s like, ‘I’m so sorry for just assuming.’”

RELATED: What is Runner’s Dystonia?

Always a Runner

Galloway has been running since she was 3 years old. Her dad was a marathoner, and she’d jog cooldown laps with him after his training runs. She ran cross country and track in high school and in college at Rutgers. And at 22, she ran her first marathon. Even though she’d been running all her life, this race distance scratched an itch Galloway didn’t know she harbored. From then on, she was hooked on the marathon.

In 2009, Galloway ran her fastest one yet—3:16:48—at the New York City Marathon. She followed that up with Big Sur, Chicago, and Boston. She struggled in Boston—stopping at mile 18 with hip pain and not feeling great—but persevered and finished.

“Then two weeks later, I was running with my friend and I took a fall,” she says. “And then I started not being able to run. My left leg would come up, but instead of going straight down, it would stay up in the air and would not come over. It was almost like my left leg didn’t know what to do.”

Galloway kept trying, but the state of her shoes suffered. Her stride, now discombobulated, forced her to land on the side of her foot. Not only was this uncomfortable, but it tore holes straight through the upper material. She went from running at a 7-minute mile pace to 11-minute mile pace. Sensing something was very wrong, she began her arduous journey of seeking a diagnosis.

First, she visited a physical therapist, who had her run forward, backward, and sideways on a treadmill so they could figure out what was going on with her gate.

“I’d run backwards, and I’d be fine. I’d run sideways—fine,” Galloway says. “But whenever I ran forward on the treadmill, I’d start to cry because my left leg wasn’t listening. It felt really hard.”

Next, she went to sports doctors and psychologists, who had plenty of suggestions (taping knees, more physical therapy, blood tests) but none could provide a clear answer. Like many people, Galloway felt a little dismissed and defeated by the lack of a definitive diagnosis. One doctor suggested she might even have Parkinson’s.

“No one was listening to me,” she says.

Fed up, she did her own research, came across runner’s dystonia, and brought the term back to her doctor. He readily agreed—this had to be it. She finally had her diagnosis.

Knowing her diagnosis was somewhat comforting, but that didn’t help with her running. By then, she’d pretty much stopped trying to run entirely.

“[I thought] I’m done with running. I’ll swim, I’ll bike. It’s why I moved to California, because it’s a lot harder to swim and bike year-round in the northeast,” she says.

Galloway reached out to Laura Cattivera, who also has runner’s dystonia, and upon hearing how much Galloway missed the sport, she suggested something unheard of: running backwards.

“She had all these newspaper clippings of the fastest 800 meters backwards,” Galloway says. “She said, ‘Oh these are world records for backwards running.’”

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Back to Running

On a recent warm Saturday afternoon, Galloway walks through the parking lot at San Diego’s Lake Murray, another popular running spot with a paved path around a reservoir. She’s there to go for a run, too, albeit backwards.

So how does backwards running work? Well, pretty similar to forward running besides the direction she’s going. Galloway regularly checks over her shoulder. She can run alone on designated running paths, but never alone in traffic. In that case, she runs with friends.

“I just run backwards and I can see cars,” she says. “It’s the same as running forwards.”

Though the act of backwards running itself isn’t super different from forward running, Galloway says it’s riskier—especially because of unseen objects, uneven terrain, rocks, holes, etc.

“That’s the part that’s really hard, because when you’re running forward and you are about to fall, you can kind of catch yourself,” she says. “But when you’re running backwards, like this little crack here, if it puts me off balance, I can’t catch myself. I just fall. I’ve become a professional backwards faller. I fall on my butt and just lift myself up.”

Knock on wood, no injuries so far, she says. In fact, she sustained her worst injuries when she was running forward.

Galloway continued to run longer distances and soon became curious about the Guinness World Records for running backwards. She found out that the world record for the women’s half marathon run backwards was 2:49, and she was pretty sure she could break it. She invited her brother to come run with her, and film the entire race on his GoPro—it has to be filmed for the record to count.

“I was going to beat it. And his GoPo, the memory went out. Oh, no. Like, it died,” Galloway says.

So the next year, they tried to do it again. Galloway ran 2:46:06 at the Rock ‘n’ Roll San Diego Half Marathon in 2015. Record broken. The woman who previously had the record—someone without runner’s dystonia who had just tried to break the record for fun—sent her a message on Facebook.

“She’s like, ‘Just so you know, I’m coming after you’,” Galloway says. “Honestly, if everybody started running backwards—like if Kara did or Des did—I would not have the record. But because no one ran backwards, I did.”

That other woman lowered the record, but Galloway ran even faster at the Carlsbad Half Marathon in 2019—2:19:45—to reclaim the record briefly.

RELATED: No Wrong Way to Run

Speaking of Kara Goucher

After Galloway got her diagnosis and started running backwards, she went to one of Goucher’s Podium Retreats.

“She was super friendly, and was the ‘running backwards’ woman,” Goucher says. “She ran to the track and did the entire workout backwards. It was beyond impressive. I know she said why she had to run that way, but I never remembered the name of her diagnosis.”

A few years later, Goucher began to have problems with her running as well. In November 2022, she, too, was diagnosed with runner’s dystonia. But she was still waiting on a second opinion from the Mayo Clinic.

“During that time, I was doing a lot of research, and I came across an interview and video on Justine,” Goucher says. “I remembered her from the retreat. When my diagnosis was confirmed by the Mayo Clinic, I was up with my family in Minnesota. I felt devastated and didn’t want anyone to know. They encouraged me to tell Justine. They reminded me that, of all the people who could understand, it would be her. So I reached out to her on Instagram and told her.”

After they connected and talked, Goucher felt like Galloway was the only person in the world who could empathize with her. The diagnosis was isolating, and many people didn’t understand the condition. But Galloway certainly did.

“She got it and I felt it. She was very supportive. She told me about a doctor she heard had helped people,” Goucher says. “But mostly, she just understood and that felt safe. She continued to check in on me, and I will always be so grateful for that.”

Goucher says she, too, can run backwards without her dystonia affecting her stride, but doesn’t feel comfortable enough to go out in public and take a casual jog. She adds that she completely understands the desire to do whatever you can to run, which for Galloway, is running backwards.

But Goucher has other ways of managing RD. She gets botox in her calf and posterior tibia every three months, takes the Parkinson’s medication benztropine before she runs, and works with a trainer who helps to make sure she’s using the muscles on the left side of her body.

She also balances small amounts of outdoor running on smooth, soft surfaces with running on a treadmill with a Lever Movement system, she says.

“I also have really learned to know what makes my dystonia worse,” Goucher says. “Lack of sleep, stress, a hard run the day before, or working a long track meet or marathon in the broadcasting booth stresses my nervous system and makes my dystonia so much worse. So I’ve learned to take days off after big stressful events or long work days.”

The Ultimate Trust Exercise

After Galloway moved to San Diego, she met a guy. His name is Dustin Beechler, and though he wasn’t much of a runner, he was impressed by Galloway’s dedication to running. They dated, got married, and then he started spotting her during races.

They run facing each other—Galloway running backwards and Beechler forwards. His job is to tell her if there’s a person or cone or reflectors or water stand or something else in her way. It’s like the ultimate trust exercise.

“I feel like she—out of habit—still looks over her shoulder, and that impacts her form and impacts her speed,” he says. “So I’m like, ‘Hey, why aren’t you listening to me? Why don’t you just follow my directions and my movements?’ If I start sliding maybe to the left or the right, she knows automatically now, without me saying anything, she’ll start mirroring the direction I’m going. We have a system where she’ll run off of my direction, and I’ll try to make those moves in advance, so it puts her in a good place to avoid any hazards on the road.”

Developing this system took a lot of time. At first, Galloway was only comfortable running with her brother, but during a race, he needed to stop, so Beechler jumped in.

“And we’ve since become a lot better at it,” he says. “Now if I just hold up my hand, I point in a direction. At first, it was really tricky, because I’d be on the left—which was my left—so then she’d go the wrong direction. But now, we could almost do it without any verbal communication.”

Whatever it takes, Galloway is just going to keep on running. She completed a half-distance Ironman 70.3 in late May in Morro Bay, California—in 7:56:6, including a 2:42:31 half-marathon running split—and is considering more triathlons and running races this year, too. She’s also thinking about running another marathon next year. And that means she’ll keep heading out on the local paths running backwards to train, and will keep getting weird comments from people.

Hopefully, someday, she says, enough people will know what’s going on that they’ll learn a lesson about not judging people.

“Being different isn’t bad,” she says.“I think that’s a lesson. Just because you do something differently, that doesn’t mean you’re wrong or you’re a problem.”