After seven months in space, Michael Lopez-Alegria missed the little things about his home on Earth, which spun lazily just 250 miles below the International Space Station. Drinking a beer. Taking a shower. Lying down to go to sleep. Even so, up until the end of his then-record-setting spaceflight in 2007, Lopez-Alegria suffered the minor annoyances of living in space as the “price of admission” to the best room in the universe.

Today, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly is probably going through some of these same emotions as he matches Lopez-Alegria’s 215-day spaceflight, en route to spending nearly a full year on the space station. During his unprecedented mission for a US astronaut, Kelly has garnered much attention. Earlier in October, President Obama called him for Astronomy Night at the White House, saying, “You’re setting a record that’s nothing to sneeze at.”

When the president asked how he was feeling, Kelly replied, “Yes sir, I’m feeling great. I feel like I’ve been here a long time. Obviously it feels like I’ve got a long time ahead. But it shouldn’t be a problem getting to the end with enough energy and enthusiasm to complete the job.”

Yet as Kelly breaks into new territory for American astronauts, it’s worth remembering the country’s first ironman astronaut, Lopez-Alegria. His seven-month mission aboard the space station, from September 18, 2006 to April 21, 2007, broke the previous US record for a single spaceflight duration by nearly three weeks. And whereas Kelly performed his first ever spacewalk on Wednesday, Lopez-Alegria did 10 during his career, spending a cumulative 67 hours and 40 minutes in space. No American did more, or spent longer, with only a spacesuit separating him or herself from the vacuum of space.

NASA astronauts have always viewed space shuttle missions, before the vehicle stopped flying in 2011, as a two-week “sprint.” Similarly, they have come to regard six-month stints on the space station as “marathons.” Before he flew to the station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2006, Lopez-Alegria had already flown three shuttle missions.

“I always thought of myself as much more of a sprinter than a distance guy,” he said. “The station was not what I was expecting. There was so much to do, and the work was so gratifying. I thought the time pretty much flew by.”

There were still those little things that are missed—Scott Kelly has at times referenced how he longs to experience simple pleasures like weather—but for Lopez-Alegria, his mind compartmentalized these desires for the comforts of home. It wasn’t a conscious effort, he recalled. Somehow, right up until the last two weeks of his mission, Lopez-Alegria’s subconscious wouldn’t let his mind dwell on what he was missing, like eating out with friends and family or lying down in a bed at night to go to sleep.

For him, one of the biggest health concerns was how his body would adjust to returning to gravity after seven months of weightlessness. Lopez-Alegria had never experienced problems during his space shuttle missions, but those were relatively short. And unlike a shuttle, which lands like a steeply diving aircraft on a runway, the Soyuz return is more jarring as the capsule falls through the atmosphere and slams into the steppes of Kazakhstan.

Some astronauts love the experience. Before he left for Russia and his year-long mission to station, Kelly commented about his last time there, in 2010, when he had returned in a Soyuz: “Even If I had hated the last six months, I would have done it all again for that last 20 minutes in the Soyuz.”

Butch Wilmore, who returned to Earth in a Soyuz in March, described the experience as coming home in a fireball. “It’s just unbelievable,” he said. “I’m sitting there in the fireball portion thinking, I can’t believe humans actually do this. They put themselves in a little bitty capsule and then sling themselves at this speed into the atmosphere. But it does. And we made it back safe.”

For his part, Lopez-Alegria was not a fan of a ride he described as “infinitely more dynamic” than the space shuttle. “I felt like my gyros were uncaged,” he recalled of the return trip, which seemed like a series of explosions followed by a car crash.

Then there was the indignity of exiting the spacecraft. The Russian rescue forces, who arrive at the landing site by helicopter, essentially extract the three astronauts and cosmonauts from the Soyuz capsule after it lands. Lopez-Alegria said he would have preferred to struggle out on his own, as a future explorer on Mars might have to do one day. But nyet.

“Being pulled and turned and manipulated like a sack of potatoes is disagreeable,” he said. “As they dragged me out, I threw up a little throw up in my mouth. You sit in those chairs for a little while and then they carry you to the medical tent.”

Lopez-Alegria discovered that he was exhausted. On a helicopter and then an airplane ride back to Moscow, for debriefings, he collapsed into a deep sleep. By the end of that day, however, he could walk on his own as long as he did so beside a wall. “You didn’t really know you were falling over until you fell over,” he said. “It’s kind of like being a little drunk.” After about 10 days, he felt normal.

Scott Kelly is spending a year in space largely so NASA can better understand the effects of long-duration spaceflight on human health, both during the mission and after landing. Yes, Russians have spent longer in space. They have had more space stations and fewer cosmonauts. Two decades ago, Valeri Polyakov spent 437 days in space aboard the Mir space station, and Anatoly Solovyev has done 16 spacewalks. But the Russians collected significantly less health data during their long-duration missions. They also didn’t have a trump card: Scott Kelly’s twin Mark, a former astronaut whose health NASA is also tracking for comparative purposes.

During his seven months in space, NASA has not released any specific information about Kelly’s health, either mental or physical. And aside from his comments during interviews, in which he always says he’s feeling great, we probably won’t get any real data until after he’s on the ground next spring. So how, really, does Lopez-Alegria think the record-breaking astronaut is doing?

“It’s hard for me to say,” Lopez-Alegria said. “I do not minimize the fact that a year is not six or seven months. It could be that’s he’s following his plan, smiling and having a great time. Or he could be going, ‘Jesus Christ, what have I gotten myself into?’ I suspect it’s the former. I really think the human psyche is capable of great things when it has to be.”