Can Gio: the 200-metre wife-carrying race and the 42 km nobody films

CAN GIO: THE 200-METRE WIFE-CARRYING RACE AND THE 42 KM NOBODY FILMS

I stood at the edge of the seaside asphalt road in Can Gio, where the organisers had painted two lines exactly 200 metres apart. No starting pistol, no athletics-style call room, just a loudspeaker and a few hundred people lined along the kerb. On the line, a 34-year-old man bent his knees and lifted his wife onto his back. The signal came. He ran with very short steps, knees deeply flexed, torso pitched forward to counterbalance the mass behind him.

They took more than three minutes to cover that distance. Xuan Them (34) and Thuy Linh (29), both members of the community running club An Suong Runners, crossed first amid the crowd's cheers. What made me linger was not the placing. It was what the husband said past the finish line: he entered because the game looked fun, and because it seemed useful to the community.

The next morning, both stood on the start line of the 42 km marathon at a race carrying a bank's name. 45 phút bên lề sân cỏ, một đời không bao giờ cũ — forty-five minutes on the sideline lasts a lifetime.

The wife-carrying contest sits among the sideline activities of a mass-participation race staged in the coastal district of Can Gio. It is held the day before the main event, and this year marked the fifth consecutive edition of the format in the programme. Alongside it were two children's distances, 1.5 km and 3 km, run in the same session with adults cheering from both sides and pacers stationed along the route.

The origin is imported. The wife-carrying format descends from Nordic eukonkanto, where the Wife Carrying World Championships in Sonkajarvi, Finland, are run over roughly 253.5 metres with obstacles, and the strongest pairs finish in about a minute. In its home country it is a genuine combat discipline, with technique, rules, and even regulations on the carrying position and the clothing of the carried partner.

In Can Gio, the course is shorter, there are no obstacles, and the pace is several times slower. That gap does not come from an organiser's mistake. It answers one question: what this race exists for. Here, it exists for laughter, for images posted to social media, for a family to be present together at the city's running festival.

The event should be placed at its proper tier. Mass marathons in Vietnam have multiplied in recent years along a festival-race model: a flagship 42 km to attract serious runners, plus shorter distances, sideline games and a children's playground to pull in whole families. Entry fees, sponsor booths, brand imagery and community goodwill are four revenue streams running in parallel. A bank lending its name to the race explains that logic more clearly than any press release.

Now to the technical side, as far as a race like this allows.

The husband in the winning pair had to carry an estimated 40 to 50 kilograms on his back for the full 200 metres. For an adult male, that is roughly 55 to 75 percent of the carrier's own bodyweight. From a biomechanical standpoint, the problem here is balance under load, not sprinting. The knee is forced through a deep flexion range, the lumbar spine is under continuous compression, and the foot has almost no elastic rebound phase. The short steps are not a poor technical choice; they are the mandatory consequence of the mass behind.

The winning pair's pace works out at about 1.1 metres per second, roughly 4 km/h. That is the speed band of brisk walking, not running. Compared with professional pairs in Finland, who reach about 4 metres per second over 253.5 metres, the gap runs to a factor of four. Ranking the figures side by side is meaningless, because this is not a discipline with standards, scoring tables, or any federation behind it.

A wife-carrying race measures load tolerance and balance, not speed; and any ranking around it is a ranking of fun, not of elite sport.

What matters is that those forty to fifty kilograms are not evenly distributed, not fixed, and not secured by the purpose-built harnesses used in wrestling or weightlifting. The load shifts with every step of the carried partner. The carrier therefore has to fight the oscillation as well, and the energy cost per metre runs far above a normal run. For a recreational runner, 200 metres is short enough to be harmless. Multiply it by ten and the picture changes completely.

The next morning is the more revealing part. Xuan Them and Thuy Linh stepped into the 42 km. That detail says the most about their fitness profile. Completing a load-bearing race the previous afternoon and then running a marathon the next morning is not how an elite athlete chasing a performance plans a schedule. It is how an experience-first runner plans, someone accustomed to accumulated volume with a base thick enough to recover overnight.

That both belong to An Suong Runners also deserves note. A community running club supplies what a solo runner lacks: a regular training group, a weekend long-run schedule, people who remind each other to sleep early before race day. In mass events, runners with a group generally post higher completion rates over long distances than solo runners, mostly through psychology and collective discipline rather than through a training plan.

The heat also belongs in the analysis. The event takes place in a southern coastal district where humidity is high and solar radiation is strong almost all day. For a 200-metre load-bearing race, that is a minor issue. For 42 km, it is the single largest variable, bigger than base fitness. Dehydration and rising core temperature are two leading causes of recreational runners collapsing around the thirtieth kilometre, and coastal race organisers generally have to space aid stations more densely than city events.

Structurally, the event sits entirely outside the competitive pyramid of world athletics. There is no entry standard, no ranking points, no selection pathway. Its value lies elsewhere: registration numbers, first-time finishers, families wearing the same race shirt.

And at that tier, the woman is no longer luggage. She is the runner.

During the children's session, there was a moment I assumed every report would skip. In the 1.5 km, a small child cried mid-course. The pacers stopped, slowed to the child's pace and escorted them to the finish instead of running on to hold their own splits. No extra medal was handed out for it. But it was the only thing all day that made me believe the organisers understood what they were doing.

When the stadium is empty, ordinary voices become leaders. A child crying at the first kilometre of a 1.5 km race, and an adult choosing to stay. In professional sport, people call that teamwork. At a community race, people call it raising the next generation of runners.

The children's distances are not a side show. They are the long-term intake funnel for the entire mass-running ecosystem. A girl running 1.5 km at eight years old may stand on a half-marathon start line ten years later, and fifteen years later may be the name races compete to invite. No academy does that job on behalf of a community race.

Now the hardest part to say.

On the stands in Russia, I heard many empty seats named after women. In Can Gio, the stands were not empty. A few hundred people lined the road, there were cheers, there were phones raised to film. But the most filmed image was a man carrying his wife on his back.

I do not question Thuy Linh's choice. She laughed, she took part, and the next morning she ran 42 km on her own two feet. The question lies with the format, not with this couple: a race in which a woman's body is designed to become someone else's payload. In Finland, the format is staged as a game with rules, and its meaning lies in its own humour. Imported into a sports market still learning to take women's sport seriously, that meaning can slip.

What troubles me is not whether the game should exist. It is how attention is being allocated. A 200-metre race can generate hundreds of thousands of views. A women's 42 km, run at the same event, is sometimes recorded in a handful of finish-line photos. Sponsors pay for what spreads, and what spreads tends to be what makes people laugh, not what is hard.

Xuan Them said he entered because it was fun and useful to the community. The organisers said the format has been kept for five straight years because it brings spectators. Both are true. And both are describing a sports media economy in which commercial value and competitive value run on separate tracks that rarely meet.

I will say plainly what I think, without softening it. Women's sport matures only when people remember the name of the woman in the 42 km, alongside the image of her being carried. Public memory is a scarce resource. It gets occupied, and the space is finite.

What I brought home from Can Gio was not a result. It was the image of the next morning, when two people who had carried each other over 200 metres stood on the 42 km start line, and behind them hundreds of other women were doing the same thing with nobody filming. In southern mass races, the share of women in long distances is rising season by season, and that is a real change, slow but measurable, independent of any communications campaign.

Nhìn bảng tỷ số, tôi học được cách đọc những gì không được ghi — looking at a scoreboard taught me to read what is not recorded. For Vietnamese women's sport, what goes unrecorded is more than people assume: the names of clubs, the names of volunteer coaches, the names of mothers who bring their children to a start line at six in the morning.

Next time a mass race posts a fun game online to pull in viewers, I will again stand at the edge of the road and count. Not the people being carried. The women standing on their own feet.