Completing one’s first marathon is a highlight that will be etched in a runner’s memory forever. For Jeremy Hallum, the experience also is etched into the semi-permanence of cyberspace.
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Hallum, the UNIX Systems administrator for the Department of Astronomy, completed his first marathon in Detroit last year. He wrote about that journey as well as subsequent workouts on his online runner’s log, accessible from his personal page, http:// www.astro.lsa.umich.edu/
users/jhallum/.
“Running across the finish line is one of the most fantastic feelings I ever had,” he says. “It takes a lot of time and effort, but it’s a lot of fun.”
Hallum ran on the cross country and track teams in high school, and competed twice in the state finals. But he says he got burned out and stopped running for about a decade.
“When I turned 30, I remembered that I hadn’t realized my dream of running my first marathon,” he says. This got him to pick up from scratch and start running all over again.
Hallum rediscovered his love of running, and soon he was training regularly during his free time. “It’s just the feeling; I find running extremely relaxing. I found out I can go out and run for lunch and come back with a new approach to a problem.”
Hallum’s love of numbers drew him to astronomy, the field in which he pursued his undergraduate and graduate degrees. It also inspired him to keep his running log online instead of manually writing it down as he did in high school.
The running log “tells me where I’ve been and where I’m at. It’s a good way to gauge for performance.”
The online running log also allows Hallum to describe the types of runs he completed, the weather conditions, even the shoe he used and how much mileage he had put on them.
“I’m a statistics freak,” he says. “I love this because you can click a few buttons and have a graph [of your performance].”
The log shows that Hallum has been running faster. That is good because he plans to run in at least one different marathon each year. He is running the Disney Marathon in Florida in January and hopes to finish it under three hours and 10 minutes. That will allow him to achieve his ultimate aim of qualifying for and running in the Boston Marathon.
In order to get to Boston, Hallum will train hard as winter approaches. “Michigan doesn’t get that cold,” he says. And if anyone needs to look back at this winter’s daily temperatures a few years from now, it will all be available online in Hallum’s log.
