The basics on the most difficult nuptial sport around: fifty couples run in the Championships, two in each heat, and the two best times overall make the finals. The husband dangles his wife upside-down over his head and tries to traverse a hilly, sloppy, divot-filled, 278-yard obstacle course as fast as he can while gradually coming to realize, once and for all, that his hamstrings are useless. He thinks, Oh God, I'm about to tumble in the most emasculating fashion possible. That was my experience, at least.
But Dave Castro did much better than that. He came up only three feet short, and he hasn't stopped thinking about it since.
***
Well before these Wife-Carrying Championships came to Newry, Maine's Sunday River Ski Resort a decade ago, and well before Dave and Lacey Castro were a world-class pair, Wife-Carrying already had a long, half-nefarious history. While Wife-Carrying sounds like something an enterprising Jack might have invented in 1956 to amuse the local Rotarians, it's actually a centuries-old Scandinavian tradition.
Story goes that a Finnish robber named Herkko Rosvo-Ronkainen used women as training weights to prepare his marauding bands for their raids on nearby villages. That's the sanitized tale, at least; it's also possible that modern-day Wife-Carrying has its origins in Rosvo-Ronkainen's knack for women-napping. This is part of why I'd been a bit reluctant to haul my progressive wife on my back like she was some sort of nifty plunder.
“Some people say, 'Oh, Wife-Carrying is such a sexist sport,'" Lacey Castro says. "But I feel like I've been training just as long as my husband has. The women are forcing the husbands to do it just as much as the other way.”
The Castros have forced themselves into phenomenal shape for the one-minute a year when they have a chance to be the absolute best at something. Silly as that something may seem to an outsider, they take the Championships seriously, and they're made for them. Lacey, a body-builder with about a thimble's-worth of body fat, weighs in at around 108 pounds, which is the minimum for wives; Dave, compact and slim, has the bulging calves of a UPS driver. Which is because he is a UPS driver.
“He's basically training all the time,” Lacey told me. “Five days a week he's running around with 50-pound boxes from door to door.” (...)
Wife-Carrying is, honestly, mostly Estonian. If only because The Estonian Carry is the sport's answer to the Fosbury Flop: both stylistic signature and agreed-upon best practice. There is no official technique in wife-carrying—Piggybacks, Fireman's Carries, and Honeymoon Threshold Lifts are all legal. But every champion has used the Estonian Carry, most notably the Estonian Uusorg brothers, the most decorated spouse-hauling athletes, and rivals of Miettenen's for international supremacy. At the farthest opposite end of the prestige spectrum, I also would need to master this Baltic carry for my own turn on the Wife-Carrying Championship course.
Since the North American Championship was my first attempt at extreme sports with my wife—they'd given us a wild card entry—I wasn't sure I could convince her to dangle near my rear as I traversed a slippery ski hill. She'd agreed to participate because I'd made some claim about Immersion Journalism, but we'd yet to get to the touchy subject of head-ass-ground proximity. I turned to the Castros for advice.
“Tell her, 'Look, you might be a little dizzy, but just hold on',” Lacey said. “Go right into the Estonian.”
Dave added: “You'll put her on your back. She might not like it at first. But it'll be good.”
I was convinced, but I was not really the one who needed convincing. Megan and I needed to practice, so before the competition, we took to the field between our apartment and the public library. It was dark. I popped her up on my shoulders and chugged up a hill. Right then, the local book club let out and we were bathed in the accusing glare of a dozen pairs of headlights. Undaunted, I took 17 laps around an oak tree and put her down. She was flushed beneath her helmet, either from embarrassment or because half her blood supply had rushed straight to her cheeks, or both.
by David Wancyzk, The Classical | Read more:
