LONDON, Dec. 4 (UPI) — On Friday, British astronaut Tim Peake announced his intention to compete in the London Marathon — from space.
Peake is scheduled to blast off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan, as part of Expedition 46. He will be joined on his trip to the International Space Station by NASA astronaut Tim Kopra and cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko of Roscosmos.
On April 24, toward the end of his six-month stay, Peake will use the ISS treadmill to log more than 26 miles as a participant in the London Marathon.
“The thing I’m most looking forward to is that I can still interact with everybody down on Earth,” Peake said in a European Space Agency news release. “I’ll be running it with the iPad and watching myself running through the streets of London whilst orbiting the Earth at 400 kilometers.”
Peake has previously run the London Marathon — on Earth. In 1999, he logged a time of 3 hours, 18 minutes and 50 seconds.
Though Peake has been been training in preparation, he likely won’t push himself to beat that time, as ESA’s medical team will be closely monitoring him to ensure he’s physically fit and healthy for his return to Earth scheduled a few weeks later.
“One of the biggest challenges I’ll be facing is the harness system,” Peake told The Guardian. “It has a waistbelt and shoulder straps. That has to provide quite a bit of downforce to get my body on to the treadmill, so after about 40 minutes, that gets very uncomfortable. I don’t think I’ll be setting any personal bests. I’ve set myself a goal of anywhere between 3:30 to 4 hours.”
If successful, Peake would be the first man to run a marathon in space. But he wouldn’t be the first person. Female NASA astronaut Sunita Williams completed the Boston Marathon from the space station in 2007.
