The Husband Who Carried His Wife 200 Metres in Can Gio: When the Track Isn't Measured in Seconds

More than three minutes for two hundred metres. Put that on the leaderboard of an official athletics meet and it is a pure paradox: a velocity under 1.1 metres per second, slower than a brisk walk by a healthy adult. But on the sand of Can Gio, where a 34-year-old man carries his wife on his back with both knees bent and strides so short they almost bunch together, that speed is the landing point of an entirely different story. Mr Xuan Them, a member of the community running club An Suong Runners, and Ms Thuy Linh, 29, have just won the wife-carrying event within the HDBank Green Marathon in Can Gio district, Ho Chi Minh City. It is a category that exists in no World Athletics ranking. Perhaps precisely because no ranking exists for it, I have to sit down and write a few lines.

Across more than twenty years of writing about athletics, I have learned one thing: most of the real stories of the track lie in the events nobody enters into the competition record. The Can Gio race has a structure worth examining closely. A flagship 42 km marathon, fronted by a commercial bank as title sponsor. Around it sits a buffer layer of children's events over 1.5 km and 3 km, plus a 200-metre wife-carrying race for couples. The wife-carrying contest has now been staged five consecutive years — long enough that it is no longer a one-off joke but a deliberate annual format.

That buffer is not accidental. It is architecture. A race that wants to survive needs a conversion funnel: the child running 1.5 km today is the 10 km entrant in five years, and the buyer of shoes, watches and sports-tourism packages in ten. The husband carrying his wife today is the man who drags his in-laws' whole family to the event, half of whom will then appear at the start line of the next distance. I have spent hours in the stands of international athletics meets where everything is measured to a hundredth of a second, but what keeps bringing me back to this sport is not the medals. Records are only a shadow; the human being is the track.

So what actually happens over those 200 metres?

Let us put it on the technical scales, seriously and soberly. The carrier adds a load of roughly 40 to 50 kilograms, equivalent to 55 to 75 percent of his own body weight. This is not a story of wind, altitude or equipment — it is a story of pure payload. Once the load reaches that threshold, the mechanics of running are rewritten from scratch. The stride shortens to keep the centre of mass over the support base. The knee angle deepens to absorb vertical compression. The ground-contact cycle lengthens, and flight time almost disappears. The result is a hybrid movement between fast walking and short-step jogging, and it matches precisely the 1.1 metres per second the report describes.

For comparison: the Nordic wife-carrying discipline, known as eukonkanto, runs over 253.5 metres, and the strongest pairs finish in about 60 seconds — nearly 4 metres per second. The gap between those two figures is not a gap in athletic condition. It is a gap in purpose. One is a contest, the other a festival. And if anyone sets 1.1 metres per second against any world, Olympic or national record, they manufacture a false precision. There is no qualifying standard for this category, no ranking points, no national-team place. The Can Gio wife-carrying event sits outside the competitive athletics system, and any attempt to place it inside is a category error.

But I want to linger here a little longer, because an intellectual trap waits on both sides. The first is categorical confusion: reading a wife-carrying race as if it were sports-performance data. The second, more dangerous for people in my trade, is to dismiss it — to treat it as amusement unworthy of discussion. Both attitudes miss what is actually taking place.

What is actually taking place is a signal about the maturity of Vietnam's running market. A marathon in a coastal district far from the city centre, backed by a bank, can draw hundreds of spectators to watch a 200-metre race whose winner takes more than three minutes. Think about that. There is no star to watch, no record to await, no place to fight for. The only thing keeping people standing there is the feeling of belonging to something happening around them. That is social capital, and in this sport social capital is the hardest thing to build and the hardest to lose.

Also in Can Gio, the image of a child crying mid-way through the 1.5 km and being helped to the finish by pacers reminded me of a line I keep writing: there are athletes who never reach the finish, yet keep running forever in my memory. That child will not remember his time. He will only remember that someone ran the whole way with him. A race that bets on memory rather than on results is a race that understands what it is selling.

Mr Xuan Them, after winning the wife-carrying event, told reporters the event brought a joyful atmosphere and connected families. More telling is the detail that both he and Ms Thuy Linh registered for the 42 km the following day. A race carrying 40 to 50 kilograms one afternoon, then a marathon the next morning, in the September weather of southern Vietnam. This is not the configuration of an elite athlete chasing a mark — it is the configuration of a seasoned recreational runner, used to a body that must work continuously and, more importantly, used to running for experience rather than for numbers.

Of course, I still have to say what needs saying. A race carrying a person on your back loads the lumbar spine and knee joints, and it places that load immediately before a 42 km distance in the heat and humidity characteristic of a southern September. The biggest risk here is not doping, not a dispute over entry places, not any integrity question — those analytical frames have no footing at a community event. The real risk lies in temperature, in hydration, and in whether the organiser applies weight categories or health screening to the load-bearing category. An event sustained for five straight years is a good signal of sustainability, but media sustainability does not automatically mean sports-medical sustainability.

There is a temptation I must always remind myself to resist: turning every small detail into a symbol. Not every worn-out shoe is a poem. Not every wife-carrying race is a metaphor for love. Sometimes it is just an afternoon in Can Gio, with people laughing, people tiring, a child helped across the finish line, and a sponsor pleased that its brand appeared in the right place. Writing about it without inflating it is itself a form of respect.

What I take from that afternoon is not the 1.1 metres per second. It is the structure: a marathon as the spine, children's races as the blood vessels, and a family game as the laughter. In many emerging running markets, people begin with mass participation and only then think about the elite, never the reverse. A country that wants marathon runners under 2 hours 20 minutes in twenty years must today have children running 1.5 km and crying along the way.

Athletics and human life share one thing: everyone has a finish line, but few run the right route. The Can Gio race had a clear finish line, only 200 metres long, and people ran it without needing any route at all. Perhaps that is why it taught me more than the meets I used to report on.