Sports-mad 41-year-old astronaut Sunita Williams set a new sporting record on Monday afternoon by running the 26.2 mile Boston Marathon in space.
NEW YORK: Sports-mad 41-year-old astronaut Sunita Williams set a new sporting record on Monday afternoon by running the 26.2 mile Boston Marathon in space.
Sunita pulled on a baseball cap, Boston Red Sox socks and struck a high-tech space treadmill with long unbroken strides during her virtual run. She was tethered to her track by bungee cords to prevent her from literally gliding away in the low gravity orbiting outpost.
Sunita got into the spirit of the 111-year-old race by following the progress of the earth marathon on her laptop. Sunita’s sister Dina Pandya also ran the race on the ground on a day when the Boston runners faced gusty winds and cold rain. In comparison, the space station was salubrious at 78 degrees Fahrenheit.
“I am done! Woo...hoo,” Sunita exulted much to the amusement of the NASA mission control team in Houston, which tracked her progress through live video feeds from the
start of the race at 9 am to mid-afternoon.
Nasa later said in a statement that Sunita circled “the earth at least twice, running as fast as eight miles per hour but flying more than five miles each second.”
Sunita wearing race bib number 14,000 finished the 26.2 mile Boston marathon in four hours and 24 minutes. She finished roughly two hours behind the top female runner Russian Lidiya Grigoryeva.
Astronauts exercise while in orbit to maintain bone density under zero gravity conditions, but NASA said no astronaut has ever attempted Sunita’s sporting feat.
Sunita qualified for the Boston race by finishing last January’s Houston Marathon in three hours, 29 minutes. According to the Associated Press, Sunita’s sister Dina “didn’t sweat the logistics when she signed them both up,” for the world’s oldest annual marathon but on December 9, Sunita took off on the space shuttle Discovery and it became clear she wasn’t going to make it to the starting line.
But Sunita was determined not to lose her place in the Boston marathon. “I considered it a huge honour to qualify, and I didn’t want my qualification to expire without giving it a shot,” Sunita told the Boston Athletic Association. The rest now is a slice of space history and one more strike for Sunita in the record books. Sunita and her husband, Michael J Williams are both sports-mad — they enjoy running, biking, triatholons, windsurfing and snowboarding.
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