When I've had that situation I've had to initiate the ping in the 2nd Arduino. The 1st then longs fine. You can then stop the 2nd pinging and smog back to set the 1st romping and it then seems to work.
As I say, using it in our own project seems fine.
We are using the RF24Network layer on too though as it gives a tree based network topology with background routing of packets up and down the tree to reach a destination node.