Giant Steps are What You Take...

..Running the Marathon on the International Space Station. Apparently you don't have to be in Boston on Patriots Day to run in the Marathon. For the last three years the Marathon has been run in Iraq with support from the Boston Athletic Association (or the BAA - the organization that runs the marathon). This year they'll be sending trophies and a finish line tape to Kosovo for a similar endeavor. The furthest competitor this year* won't even be earthbound. Suni Williams, a Needham native, will be running with bib number 14,000 while she orbits the earth in the International Space Station. The astronaut qualified for the marathon when she completed the marathon in Houston last year with a time three seconds shy of three and a half hours.

From the AP report

Williams has run a handful of marathons, and she went through rigorous testing before being blasted into orbit. But three months with little gravity takes a toll on a human, and NASA requires all members of a station crew to exercise on the treadmill, a stationary bike and a resistance machine to maintain bone density and muscle mass.
"In microgravity, both of these things start to go away because we don't use our legs to walk around and don't need the bones and muscles to hold us up under the force of gravity," Williams told the BAA.

A treadmill outfitted with bungee cords to simulate gravity will be used as Williams runs the 26.2 miles in space. Because she'll be participating from the International Space Station she might not be able to start at the same time the other runners do, she'll be on Russian time and may be asleep when the race begins. But those details seem inconsequential in her quest to complete this goal while orbiting the globe.

The obvious question remains: do those astronaut diapers fit underneath traditional running shorts?

* We're not going to do the math on this one – but she'll be running while orbiting the earth at 17,500 mph, at 210 miles above the earth's surface. So theoretically during the orbit she may be closer to Boston than Iraq is, depending on the orbit of the ISS. It's confusing stuff we'll leave to the physicists and mathematicians. Still we have no idea how Heartbreak Hill will play a factor in her completion of the marathon.