Holy shit.

At around 2:45 either she speeds up quickly, or the car slowed down for a moment, and she was apparently millimeters from colliding with that little bar. Five seconds later, she's nearly pitched out the left side of the car (right side of the video).

From the perspective of the video it looks like shockingly small margins for error. The raw courage is remarkable, I'd never do anything like this!

The bike appears to have a device on it which allows it to collide with the bar of the car safely. It appears to me that she collides with it a bunch of times, both while accelerating and decelerating. This appears to be by design?

Definitely the risk of hitting the side of the fairing seems nontrivial though.

Here is a video that Wired released a few days ago that discusses the details of the tow hook and the little bar: https://youtu.be/cZhrqKrljig

it's probably not just a bar, but a roller that spins.

Looks to me like a lever hooked to the brake lines, so if she hits the bar the wheels brake. That's how I would hook it up anyway :)

Dunno what they did to the brakes vs standard bicycle brakes, but I'd be very worried about activating them automatically at ~170mph. With those speeds and the winds, it wouldn't take much to set you tumbling across the ground. I would expect they only brake very carefully and gently until they get the speeds back down some.

At those speeds, even maximum braking is gentle - the blocks near instantly heat up and lose material. There's a reason why car and motorcycle use heavily cooled and much stiffer as well as more abrasive materials for brakes.

You have to be really careful to engage both front and back brakes at the same time though.

Yeah, that bar is similar to the bar on a derny (scooter used as a pace vehicle for keirin racing).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derny

The front of the bicycle has a special interface for colliding with the bar. She uses it several times during breaking.

Thanks, it's crazy that it doesn't look that fast in the video even though she's going over 180mph.

Crazy.

But I'm not so sure about this claim that the coach makes:

My theory is that women are able to push that aging envelop a little further than men and are more capable of long-distance peak performance

At the top end, the strongest men are always stronger than the strongest women, and age impacts women more quickly than men, judging by rowing results: https://www.concept2.com/indoor-rowers/racing/records/world/...

ITT: People talking past each other about 'highest performing males outperform highest performing females at almost everything' vs. 'average women are better at some things than average men.'

Women do as well or better than men in ultra distance swimming. See https://www.thecut.com/2016/09/the-obscure-endurance-sport-w...

That article actually says that the average time for women is faster than the average time for men and that the fastest male times are still much faster than the fastest female times. The hypotheses they propose for the difference are either selection bias due to differing participation levels or possibly body fat percentage difference leading to greater bouyancy which specifically helps in swimming.

Women also do remarkably well in ultrarunning. See Courtney Dauwalter who just took 2nd place overall at Tahoe 200 miler and legends like Ann Trason

Or Camille Herron, who set the overall course record on a 100 mile trail course. https://www.runnersworld.com/news/a20863588/cheers-100-miles...

Camille's run wasn't particularly remarkable--about 10% slower than the men's 100 mile record.

Much more amazing to me is that this 10% performance difference holds remarkably steady for men and women's performance in a great range of distances, both running and swimming[0].

[0] - https://sportsscientists.com/2007/10/women-vs-men-part-ii-th...

If a world record isn't particularly remarkable then I don't know what is

Comment above:

> Women also do remarkably well in ultrarunning.

Yes, a world record is always remarkable in the general sense.

But in this specific context (discussing the coach's claim that women are "more capable of long-distance peak performance"), I wanted to point out that women's ultrarunning world records are not particularly better or worse than women's world records at other distances, even sprints.

Yep, I've heard the same about thru-hiking. Women might be faster at running 2000+ miles than men. It's for efforts measured in minutes or hours that the fastest men are faster than the fastest women.

Edit: I wasn't expecting my comments here to be so controversial

Do you have any source for this? It seems with such a small participation rate for thru-hiking, getting any sort of meaningful data about relative abilities would be unlikely.

That's very true, extraordinarily few people are going for fastest times on these, so it's quite speculative. Here's an article about it: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/04/sports/on-the-longest-hik...

Women tend to be lighter than men, which likely makes a difference.

Also this is not a long-distance endurance event, it lasts only a few minutes and should be more about technique, peak power output and engineering skill.

The fastest people in the world at 1500-metre runs or 5k bike time trials are never 45-year-old women.

Definitely. As a rule of thumb, the shorter the event, the more it advantages young males.

In my day to day life in the biking world, the women who don't train can keep up with the men who do.

I don't see how that's possible, given that men's times are better than women's times in all events. Just look at records, race times, etc. The trained men are dominating the trained women, and clearly the untrained women won't do better than the trained women. This pattern is consistent across all sports except possibly ultra-endurance events (way longer than a marathon equivalent).

I'm not talking about athletes, I'm talking about out of shape dads vs out of shape moms.

Might be because men are more likely than women to be overweight, or at least out of shape?

[citation needed]

Here’s one: https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/adult-overweightob...

The numbers were a bit higher than I expected: 70% of men in the US are overweight and 60% of the women? Wow.

The medical definition of "overweight" is pretty broad, and may include some people you wouldn't think of that way at a glance. But yeah, it's pretty bad.

Edit: Completely baffled why people are downvoting this.

The US must be a nation of body builders if 70% overweight doesn't mean >65% too fat.

I just meant that mildly overweight people wearing well-fitting clothes may not "read" as overweight to the casual observer. Some people think "overweight" means "obese," which makes the 70% figure more startling. It's still a major national health issue.

The average American male seems to carry more upper body muscle mass than, say, your average Indian male. You don't have to look like Schwarzenegger or The Rock to find yourself bumping up against the general guideline numbers.

You have to look like a body builder if you want to to bump against the guideline numbers while having a reasonably low body fat percentage.

No you don't. I'm 6'2", 200, 15 - 17% body fat, and my BMI is too high. I'm only moderately active (no gym time, just active or laborious hobbies).

I read your comment as “yeah but those stats are only 80-90% accurate”. (I didn’t downvote it)

BMI is a measurement. The ill effects of obese BMI on health is pretty much settled.

The main thing I know there's been some recent controversy regarding the health risks of the edge cases of the "overweight" category. (https://www.verywellhealth.com/is-being-a-little-overweight-...).

My best guess is that your edge cases are going to come from people who are slightly overweight but still exercising regularly and have an overall healthy diet (as this WebMD page implies -- https://www.webmd.com/diet/features/can-you-be-fit-fat#1). These people may be healthier overall than someone in the "normal" range with a bad diet and sedentary lifestyle.

Best guess is that this is not the majority of overweight people, though... Exercise statistics in the US are pretty dismal. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-80-percent-of-american-adul...).

If BMI is the measure, then that isn’t a good measure. Dwayne The Rock Johnson is “overweight.”

I found the article on this: https://www.menshealth.com/weight-loss/a19537796/the-problem...

But seems like a corner case.

Haha, yes. I'm sure most Americans have a body comparable to that of Dwayne Johnson.

I'll have you know that I'm currently in the middle of an intermittent-feast cycle, but yes, I typically resemble DJ.

You are not 'most americans'.

It was just a bad joke..