Slashdot Mirror
Astronaut to Run the Boston Marathon From Space
BostonBehindTheScenes writes "American astronaut Sunita Williams will run 26.2 miles on a treadmill on Patriot's Day (April 16th for those of you outside of Massachusetts) while runners on the ground will compete in the 111th Boston Marathon, according to this New Scientist article.
And yes, she is an actual registered participant who qualified by finishing among the top 100 women in the Houston Marathon in 2006. NASA's press release touts this as yet another space first."
I protest! She is wasting precious oxygen paid for by you the taxpayer.
Physiologically speaking, you don't have any gravity for your blood stream, specifically your heart, to handle. In my opinion you can't compare such a run to a real one!
Moooooommm, Sunie's hogging all the oxygen again!
Sunie, Cut it out. Don't antaonize your sister.
But, I gotta win the maaarathonn.
Well, do it quietly, dear. Your sister has experiments to conduct.
meh
Yes, I know this is Slashdot. But I'm a geek and a passionate marathon runner as well...
There's a big difference between running on a treadmill and on a road (besides the boring factor): the relative wind resistance you experience when you move has a very significant impact on your speed. A rule of thumb is that you have to subtract about 1 km/h to your treadmill speed in order to have an idea on how fast you can go on the road.
Patriot Day? Was this some stipulation of the Patriot Act?
Dekker Dreyer
In fact, she weighs next to nothing.
HAND.
...like a locker room.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
For the unaware, Patriots' Day commemorates the Battles of Lexington and Concord which are considered to be the first skirmishes of the American Revolution, a conflict that was actually fought be people generally considered to be patriots.
We in Massachusetts have been observing this day long before a certain President co-opted the name to add a bit of jingo to the commemoration of a certain day in September.
Will she be wearing diapers?!
moving all your mass forward/uphill vs basically just bouncing up and down. And of course, in space, you don't even have the resistance of bouncing up and down.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Makers of treadmills expect increased profits as people realise they don't have to go to the expense of actually travelling to a event to take part.
Can you imagine if JFK was president now? "We choose to run on the space treadmill and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are publicity stunts!".
... the C shell?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
In the same way that with a webcam, you don't need to be on-hand (or on anything else) to contribute to a bukkake.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Seriously, what would our outer-space neighbours think if they picked that moment to swing by and pay us a visit? They're just going to scratch their heads and think we're some backwards species that powers space flight by putting funny sweaty little creatures on treadmills!
One more modpoint wasted.
Ms. Rosie Ruiz, will be competing in the race from the gym on a cruise ship in the north Atlantic... her mile times will be posted to the race organizers via IM.
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
. . . monkeys in a can.
What?
All you people who were saying the International Space Station was a huge waste of money that was only ever used for pointless publicity stunts - you've all gone quiet now, haven't you..?
If she runs too fast she will turn into pure energy, right?
NASA confirms that Rosie Ruiz has stowed away on a Soyuz supply ship scheduled to dock with the ISS just before the end of the marathon.
Each marathon is different because of the gradients, the times for the London marathon could not be compared to the New York comparison, so yeah, she'll be running 26.2miles, and she'll be doing it at the same time, but that's where the similarity ends. She's by no means runningt he same marathon. Not to mention gravity and oxygen differences.
She's going to have tethers to keep her down. As a runner, I think it would be an interesting approximation of running.
While the impact against the treadmill could well be compared to gravity, I wonder whether the zero-gravity will make it harder for her heart to pump blood to her legs. I couldn't imagine running upside down.
Also, having run on the treadmill, I think a good approximation of running outside would be to set the incline to about 1.5%. Of course, that starts to disproportionately work out your quads as opposed to your hamstrings.
an anonymous slashdotter will be competing in the wheelchair category from his cubicle using an Aeron chair and a piezoelectric sensor to detect lateral fidgeting while slinging Java for a large consulting outfit.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
No mention of The Flash's time traveling space treadmill?
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
in space, you don't even have the resistance of bouncing up and down.
I don't think that resistance is quite the right word, but I agree with you in general - what she's doing shouldn't qualify as running the marathon. The biggest problem with long-term space travel is bone loss, and NASA has already proven that just tethering a person to a treadmil and letting them exercise doesn't fix the problem. They still lose bone mass. That's all the proof I need that what she's doing isn't the same as running on earth.
Still, there is a bright side to this. This might just be the longest run on a treadmill in zero-g. And since she has run marathons on the ground, she will be in a good position to report what the differences are and maybe this will lead to better zero-g exercise equipment.
no mention of outsourcing or cows or curry till now.....
7-8-9-10-0
No gravity means no convection. No headwind means little conduction.
Will they generate an artificial headwind using a fan, or does the International Space Station have powerful air conditioning already?
Reduce, reuse, cycle
I hope she is not a sweater or else you are going to have a lot of water flying around the space station. Something tells me that can't be good for all the electronics.
... a simulated Heartbreak Hill?
Having done the Boston Marathon, I'm curious how she plans on emulating the experience of Heart Break Hill.
Bush can talk about going back to the moon all he wants. By putting the date out around 2018, he leaves it up to somebody else to actually accomplish it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I just wanted to say that the submitter's site is pretty interesting, with audio features on stuff all around Boston. It's definitely worth a listen if you are familiar with the city, and will probably be a fun distraction even if you're not.
Being a Boston thing, this is actually somewhat related, I guess. Funny there's no show on the marathon.
The ISS is moving at 7.726 km/s (I checked this morning - I'm running Orbitron to track a different satellite.) 26.2 miles converts to 42.165 km, so she should traverse the course length in about 5.5 seconds.
... a two ... a three. Three.
How many steps does it take to complete a marathon from low earth orbit? A one
What would be cool is if they had her treadmill linked to a robotic proxy on earth that would follow the marathon route with the real runners.
...at 17500mph she should cross at about the 5.35 second mark.
I want to run the Marathon from my Wii.
It looks like I will be running the marathon on my couch and quit possibly in my bed also, probably won't be doing too much running either, but hey...at least I am participating in the Boston Marathon (even though I not in the correct city or state or registered or even running).
Possibly. Marathon has been ported to run on top of SDL, so it does run on Linux and BSD. But why you would want to play Marathon, I don't know.
... you are not a patriot if you cannot name.
So I guess only American history buffs can be patriots then. The many brave European soldiers who fought, and died, opposing Nazi Germany's invasion of their homelands were not patriots because they had never heard of Lexington, or Concord.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
On the other hand she has to 'run' about 60000 miles. They should have made it walkathon they could made up NASA's whole budget for the year.
n/t
Many of the popular marathons in the US have same-day events in Iraq. Sometimes the courses are pretty cramped and soldiers do many laps. Probably good for morale.
Of course, you realize that since there's a runner running the Boston Marathon in space, all normal space travel routes will have to be closed, satellites will need to be stopped for several hours or directed in long, convoluted, indirect routes to their destinations - and even then possibly get "stuck" somewhere, unable to proceed until the marathon's over - and any orbiting satellites trapped by this process will be subject to ticketing by the Boston Police for parking violations.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
Nahh. There won't be the gravity to hold it down at her feet: it'll be free to return to her heart, minus friction losses.
It's still a long way to run on the treadmill, though.
Didn't realize they had enough time to run 26 miles on station. Suppose they could learn about metabolism that way.
Make that two! (or four if this and the parent are modded down!)
but give us what we really want: space porn.
How do you measure the incline of the treadmill in microgravity?
I'm dubious about the effect of inclining the treadmill (in earthbound gymnasiums, not in space). I'd be happy to be corrected here, but since your body isn't rising relative to the earth, as it would be if you were running uphill, you aren't gaining potential energy. I think this means it shouldn't be as hard as actually running uphill.
... could I run a marathon on that treadmill. No cup holder for my beer!
If not, it must be under the C.
I had a long discussion with my GF on this; I lost.
Imagine, instead of a runner, a car on a giant treadmill. Assuming that the treadmill is moving at a fixed rate (that is, the force the car places on the belt doesn't affect the belt's speed) the car must do more work to stay in place if the treadmill is at an incline. That's because, while the wheels are turning at the same speed, the car must use more force to counteract the force of gravity.
Where does the extra work go? The car's force on the belt would tend to increase its speed, so if we assuming that the treadmill moves at a fixed rate, the motor which moves the belt would be doing less work. In fact, if the car's force on the belt exceeds the belt's friction, the treadmill would need some mechanism to absorb the extra work, such as a brake.
It works a little differently if you're assuming that the belt has no speed regulatory mechanism, and is slowed only by a constant level of friction (as I was, though this isn't true of most treadmills). In that case, more incline will require the car to increase its speed to remain in the same place, and so it will also do more work (as the energy lost to friction will increase).
The mistake I made is to assume that a treadmill without an active speed regulatory mechanism can remain at the same speed when you increase the incline.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
I like that she loves running so much that she will take time out of (what many consider) the greatest achievement in mankind to do it.
Someone needs to figure out how to wire her glorified gerbil wheel to a power generator. For instance using something like this story where this guy tries hooking up his hamster to generate power.
For some reason I refuse to use either spell check or the spacebar properly.
It would be great if someone found a point to a $100 billion space station.
Until then we will just see pointless articles like this.
She must be totally bored.
I wonder if at least she has a fast internet connection?
Just so I could frog blast the vent core.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
That she's moonwalking?