Having spent more than a year in space, Frank Rubio now has to get used to that nasty thing that earthlings call gravity.

“The first few days, the soles of the feet and lower back hurt a little bit when walking,” he said at a news conference Friday at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

“I think there is a certain level of pain associated with the fact that your lower back is now supporting half your weight.”

Rubio returned to Earth two weeks ago after 371 days in space and departed on a Russian rocket last September for a routine six-month flight.

The Soyuz spacecraft that was supposed to bring them back was docked with the International Space Station and used as an emergency backup. However, there was a coolant leak in December, probably due to a micrometeoroid.

For this reason, the Russian space agency Roscosmos sent the ship back to Earth as a precaution. He sent another empty one, which meant Rubio and his friends would have somewhere to return, but they would have to take over the mission intended for the crew that was originally supposed to be on the second ship.

“It was kind of torture for me to have to spend a whole year in prison because I love being out,” Rubio said. “But that’s part of the mission. It took a bit of a mindset shift and, ‘Hey, this is my world for the next 12 months and I’m going to have to deal with it.’ had to say.

But that setback allowed this son of Salvadoran immigrants to break the record for the longest time an American has spent in space, breaking the record of 355 consecutive days set by Mark Vande Hey in 2022. The world record belongs to Russian cosmonaut Valery Polyakov with 437 days.

“The first few days (on Earth), you’re drifting left or right trying to go straight,” he says.

“Your mind is completely clear, but your body is not reacting the way you expect.”

Rubio noticed another potential during his time on the ISS when he first grew tomatoes.

“I think about what the first tomato in space was like,” he said.

He put it in his “bag” and fastened it with Velcro, but eventually lost sight of it. Rubio searched for him for hours but to no avail. Maybe it dried out and was thought to be garbage.

But “some might say I ate it,” he jokes.