Local News
“It’s going to be awesome.”
Astronaut and Needham native Suni Williams was among the runners who suited up for the Falmouth Road Race on Sunday, running the competition’s seven miles remotely from the International Space Station.
In a video posted to social media by race organizers, Williams started by giving a send off to the wheelchair division.
“You’re going to crush it,” she said.
The astronaut then navigated her way to a harness where she strapped on her bib number and prepared to run her race on a treadmill in space.
“It’s going to be sort of crappy but I know it’s going to be hard for you guys, too,” Williams said. “That race is tough. There’s a lot of twists, a lot of turns, a lot of up and downhill, then you’re in the cooker next to the coast. But it’s going to be great. It’s going to be awesome.”
Williams called the Falmouth Road Race “amazing” for the money it raises for the community and praised everyone participating. Her sister, she said, works for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and lives in the area with her family.
“So we’ve been part of the Falmouth community for a long time,” Williams said, adding that she was “just happy to be a part of all this that’s going on.”
Williams is no stranger to running in space, having previously run the 2012 Falmouth Road Race and 2007 Boston Marathon from the International Space Station.
The Massachusetts native has been at the International Space Station since June, when she and fellow astronaut Butch Wilmore were expected to stay a week after traveling into space as the first pilots aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. But troubles with the capsule’s thruster have left its ability to safely return Williams and Wilmore to Earth in doubt.
NASA has said it is still deciding whether the two astronauts will stay at the space station until next year.
A Needham High School graduate, Williams has been on two other space missions since becoming a NASA astronaut in 1998 and until 2017 was the record holder for cumulative spacewalking time by a woman astronaut.
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