It's happened before—for Dave and for his wife Lacey, perennial contenders at the North American Wife-Carrying Championships, a raucous gathering attended by both fitness fiends and softies like me who think, wrongly, that Wife-Carrying is an easy kind of carnival game. It's not.

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.

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