Volume 2, No. 20. October 25, 2002
An air
force of one
At the Medical Division
of the German Centre for Aviation and Aerospace in Cologne-Porz, future pilots
and astronauts undergo rigorous physicals and tests to determine their fitness
for flying German Air Force fighter jets and space travel. American Richard
Rodriguez was there in May, undergoing eyesight and hearing tests, X-rays and
“all types of stress tests,” he said. “They checked every bone
in my body.” Doctors and some of the fresh-faced pilots going through their
physicals asked Rodriguez what he would be flying: an F-16 fighter, perhaps,
or maybe a Tornado F2? “I’ll be on the GeForce,” he replied.
They didn’t know what he was talking about.
They do now. A couple of days after those physical tests Rodriguez boarded the
Expedition GeForce, the Intamin mega-coaster at Holiday Park in Hassloch,
which he would ride a world-record 104 consecutive days. The marathon, concluded
on September 3, was Rodriguez’s 15th world record for coaster marathoning
and his second at Holiday Park. In 1982 he rode a then world record 384 consecutive
hours on the park’s steel corkscrew coaster, the Superwirbel.
Whereas most Rodriguez marathons are merely publicity events and cultural references,
at Holiday Park they also take on the specter of scientific research.
“Wolfgang (Schneider, the park’s director) is always interested in
doing something for science,” Rodriguez said. For the Superwirbel
ride, Schneider had his guest wear a heart monitor. For the Expedition GeForce
stint, Schneider, with Rodriquez’s blessing, contacted the country’s
aerospace leaders, who jumped at the chance to study one man’s daily encounters
with 4.5 Gs, weightlessness and the “hostile environment” of continuous
coaster riding. “They figured out that altogether he was five days in weightlessness,”
said Rudi Mallasch, Holiday Park’s marketing director. “That was like
a space shuttle mission.”
Using the initial physical as a baseline, the aerospace doctors occasionally
visited Rodriguez during his summer-long run to do further tests. Then he went
through another physical at the end of the marathon, and the results will be
studied and compiled in a formal report. Rodriguez also accepted an invitation
to speak at the aerospace conference afterward to describe his experience. “I
talked about the training effect of adapting to the hostile effects of a roller
coaster,” he said. “The toughest part of a marathon is the first three
or four days because the body is adapting. After that it actually gets easier.
After a month it’s more settling to be on a coaster than to be off walking
around.”
Actually, for Rodriguez the toughest part of the marathon was the tests. “The
marathon is a difficult thing by itself; you don’t want to have anything
that intrudes on it. Anytime you ride around with an EKG and you’ve got
wires running up your arm and fingers, it feels funny. It’s a pain. It
gets in the way in an already uncomfortable situation.”
Nevertheless, with the hospitality and camaraderie heaped upon him at Holiday
Park, Rodriguez was happy to comply. The testing also further enhanced the publicity
the marathon already was generating, said Mallasch. “On some days I had
80 newspapers in Germany writing stories on (the marathon),” he said. He
got coverage from “all the radio stations in Germany,” from Univision
in Miami, the NBC Today Show and enough television news reports to fill up more
than an hour of video tape.
Among the people who stopped by to cheer on Rodriguez were military personnel,
U.S. and German. And when Rodriguez returned to the aerospace center in Cologne
for the conference last month, Mallasch took along a stack of Expedition
GeForce posters. They all were quickly snapped up by those fresh-faced pilots.
©2002, Minton Enterprises
LLC
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