Dogfights

"Pretending air-to-air combat with identical aircraft makes it difficult to gain an advantage. Pilots are more tempted to push their vehicles to the edge of their performance to gain a simulated 'kill'. In my air force career there had been numerous incidents of dogfighting pilots crossing that edge, losing control, and having to eject - or dying when they didn't... In fact, it happened so often worldwide the airforce ultimately banned the practice of identical jets simulating a dogfight." (Mullane)

So if the jets are of different designs, then the pilots will play to their vehicles' respective strengths. Dogfights between identical jets, however, neutralize the characteristics of the machinery - the question becomes, which pilot is willing to risk death in order to win.

I love dogfights. Top Gun was an awesome, if mildly innuendo-ridden, dogfight movie. The dogfights were the only redeeming aspect of Pearl Harbor.

My teammates and I dogfight. In fact, these aren't 1-on-1 affairs, they are all-out duels with 3 to 12 very competitive, very individual protagonists. Like jetfighters, one has to wonder: are we mismatched, or are we essentially identical? I don't know the answer to that. Some of us are fitter than others, and we all have our own strengths; still, on any given day, any one of us can beat all the others, if he rides smart and the stars are aligned properly.
SpikyHair and BeastMaster Bleed From Their Eyes
It's really a beautiful thing. We go on these crazy rides to the middle of nowhere and back, with the Raritan River and the Watchung Hills setting the scene. We ride with the knowledge that every hill, every Rutgers sign, even everywhere that Jenks decides arbitrarily and without informing anyone, is a finish line, a stage on which drama will inevitably unfold. The roads are our arena, and like fighter pilots and gladiators, we battle to the death.

Okay, not to the death. That would defeat the purpose of riding for fitness, and besides, the cars are doing enough to try to kill us anyway (just kidding, Mom and Dad!). Not to the death, but close to the death. Seriously, we are playing on the edge of goodnight-sweet-prince death, dogfighting like evenly matched fighter pilots, driven to win. Drastic maneuvers push the limits of stalling their jets... Hill sprints flirt with the limits of stalling our hearts.

It's best not to think of training in such terms, but we do it all the time! Think about it... My heart rate has gone over 195 a handful of times this week. The highest heart rate I've ever recorded was 199.

We throw around the term Maximum Heart Rate a lot, usually as a reference relative to which we can estimate our "Heart Rate Zones". It's a blase term, but the physiology of a Maximum Heart Rate is pretty freaky.

The cells of the heart, like those of any other muscle, contract when an electric current passes through them. Near your Maximum Heart Rate, your heart's cells are contracting more than 3 times every second. Waves of electricity are passing through each cell every 300 milliseconds. If you were in a doctor's office and this happened, they'd call it tachycardia and freak out.

If the gap between waves gets any smaller, if the frequency of contraction gets any higher, the waves stop being waves. They overlap, and the cells don't recover between contractions. Instead of contracting as one continuous section of heart, the cells contract whenever they can, and the wall of the heart shimmies rather than shrinks. Blood doesn't get pumped through the body, it gets tickled. This is called fibrilliation. It will make you dead.

Fortunately, the body doesn't like being even close to Maximum Heart Rate, because the body doesn't like being even close to dead. We're not actually in any risk, unless our hearts are already damaged. We may puke, we may cramp, we may even pass out, but our bodies will do their best to keep us alive.

So we go to HermesCraig's Miss-N-Out (aka Elimination, aka Devil Takes the Hindmost, aka "Lord Chancellor Knottingbury takes the last sportsman and refuses him his foie gras after the foxhunt on wheels" [SpikyHair 2007]), or we go to CapnChaz's Candy Mountain Ride, or we just say "hey, I'm doing 2nd bridge 8am Thursday, meet at the Brower". And we push each other, dogfighting, until we're close to death. And then we go home.

I love this sport. But good god, I do get antsy when 2 awesome rides take place during my F'IN REST WEEK!!! Have fun you jerks.

Mullane, Mike. Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut. New York: Scribner, 2006.