By Terry Karkos,Staff Writer

NEWRY – Erhin and April Armstrong have a penchant for the offbeat.

Five years ago, Harvard Medical School students Erhin Johnson and April Wang, as they were then known, ran in the Boston Marathon. At the finish line, Erhin Johnson dropped to a knee, pulled an engagement ring out of his pocket and proposed to his running partner.

On Saturday, under a driving rain, Erhin Armstrong carried his wife upside down on his back to a first-place finish in the sixth annual North American Wife Carrying Championship at Sunday River Ski Resort in Newry.

Crossing the finish line and hollering, husband and wife crashed to the ground as hundreds of spectators cheered.

Crawling through the mud, the drenched couple quickly sought each other and passionately kissed, while second-place finishers Mark and Sara Brennick, of Rumford, strained to reach the end of the grueling 278-yard course.

“It was surreal,” Erhin Armstrong said afterward of the race and win, which gave the couple his wife’s 127-pound weight in Redhook beer – five cases – cash and a round-trip ticket to Finland to compete in the Wife Carrying World Championships next summer.

The young doctors, who are completing their residencies at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and live in the Brighton section of Boston, almost didn’t make it to the competition, said Erhin’s stepmother, Nancy Caudle-Johnson of Camden.

Erhin Armstrong, a cardiologist, worked a 12-hour shift, getting off at 7 a.m. Saturday. He slept in the car on the way to the Newry competition while his wife, a dermatologist, who came to America from China when she was a child, drove, hoping to make it to the noontime competition.

“Oh, my God! Oh, my God! I can’t believe they did it!” Caudle-Johnson said at the finish line, standing near her husband, Doug Johnson, who held an umbrella in one hand, the leash of his son’s large dog in the other.

Two years ago, Caudle-Johnson sent the couple a newspaper clipping about the race.

“They love wacky and competitive things. They ran for 100 days in a row one year, rain or shine,” Caudle-Johnson said.

The Armstrongs, who chose “Armstrong” for their married surname because it sounded good over the hospital intercom, learned about the race last weekend and only had one chance to practice.

Erhin Armstrong said he went to a local park in Boston, measured out the length of two football fields, then practiced running back and forth while carrying his upside-down wife on his back like a backpack.

In Finland, it’s known as the “Estonian” carry, where the “wife” holds her husband around the waist of the husband and tightens her legs around his neck, which frees the man’s hands to climb over log hurdles.

Though visibly disappointed, the Brennicks, who finished fifth last year, congratulated and hugged the Armstrongs, who won with a time of 1 minute, 20.1 seconds.

The Brennicks finished 2.6 seconds after.

Taking third place, with a time of 1 minute, 23.5 seconds, were John Holland and Katherine Eitelbaum, of Chicago.

Eighteen men and women from Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Illinois, and Alaska participated in the event.

A first was also achieved when 6-foot, 2-inch tall Anna Sleator carried her 6-foot, 5-inch tall partner, John Lund, both of Wenham, Mass.

To chants of “Anna, Anna” from the large crowd, Sleator walked, stumbled, fell, and ran, finishing with a time of 4 minutes, 23.6 seconds.

Lund, who won the event two years ago and placed seventh in Finland last year, then carried Sleator for a second go-round.

“Women, you can do anything if you put your mind to it,” said the soft-spoken Sleator, a furniture mover and former college rower.