While runners were competing in the Boston Marathon Sunday, astronaut Sunita “Suni” Williams was running her own race on a treadmill 210 miles above the Earth in a space station traveling 17,500 mph. She started her race at 10 a.m. strapped in a harness to the treadmill so she wouldn’t float away while one of two laptop computers provided a live feed of the race from Boston. By the time she completed the first 9.5 miles of 26.2-mile race, the space station had already circled the Earth once. The 41-year-old astronaut qualified for the Boston race by finishing the Houston Marathon in January. In an interview with the Associated Press last week, Williams said, “Marathons are hard on the body. It’s hard on the machine [treadmill]. I hope both of us survive.”
That’s what I call dedication. Most people probably would have skipped the marathon if they knew they were going to be out of town, or in Williams’s case, out in space.
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