Inside The Sex Boot Camp

For his wife Annie's 40th birthday, Douglas Brown knitted her a scarf. This is not as simple as it sounds. Up till that point, Brown, 42, had never so much as cast on a row of stitches.

"But I couldn't think of what I could buy her that would really emotionally stir her," he says. "She likes anything handmade. I was thinking about things more masculine - maybe I'd make her a table. Then it occurred to me: she loves to knit. If I could learn and knit her something, she would be very excited."

So Brown, a journalist at the Denver Post, emboldened by his brainwave, surreptitiously started knitting classes in a local wool shop, surrounded most evenings by women who had gathered to "stitch and bitch". (Learning of his mission, all the women responded in the same way: "Awwwww".)

There was a time when Brown - a father of two girls, now nine and five - would not have dreamed of such a gesture. But a 101-day sex marathon with your wife changes a man.

"I think the fact that I was hypersensitive about her birthday was a direct result of the marathon," says Doug.

It turns out that the scarf, which Annie, now 41, did not take off for days, was the bonus prize in a game they both agreed to play, with much enthusiasm though little certainty about the end result. But as Brown chronicles in his memoir of their experiment - Just Do It: How One Couple Turned Off the TV and Turned on Their Sex Lives for 101 Days (No Excuses!) - the effect of their self-imposed sex marathon is the dream of many a family therapist. (And Hollywood. It has already been optioned for a movie.)

"We communicate better, we touch more, we have better sex," says Doug, happily.

"I came to realise that sex is the glue in marriage," adds Annie. "If we're not physically connected, then we can't be emotionally connected. And if we aren't emotionally connected, then our family doesn't work."

In person, the Browns are the classic, wholesome American couple. Married for 13 years, they are affable, close; the kind of partners who casually finish each other's sentences. Annie, who works at home for a food company, loves knitting and baking; they both like hiking. "Early in a relationship, sex is very vibrant," admits Doug. "It's the centre of it. And I think it does kind of fade. We still had a sex life," he says of where they found themselves 11 years and two kids (then aged three and seven) into their marriage. Yet it was usually once a week and then only on weekends.

Like so many couples in midlife, parenting, career pressures and money issues took centre stage, while their erotic lives moved into the sidelines. "We did communicate fairly well, but life intervened. During the week you're just exhausted," says Doug. "We would get into bed and maybe talk a little bit, open a magazine or watch TV but then, 'Goodnight, honey'."

"I remember when nap time went away, that was huge," adds Annie. "Because often we could have sex on Saturday or Sunday afternoon when the girls slept, but that ended. I do remember a couple of discussions after our children were born ... "

"Like, wouldn't it be fun if we could have more sex?" Doug jumps in. "We weren't resentful, I wasn't like, damn, she's not doing it enough. I was exhausted too."

Then in 2005 Doug covered a conference for his paper on sex and pop culture, where he learned of a phenomenon known as the "100 Day Club" - a support group for men in relationships, who haven't had sex for 100 days or more. Doug went home and told Annie about the club and she came up with a suggestion. "Why don't we start our own club?" she said. "Only we'll reverse it. Instead of not having sex for 100 days ... let's have sex for 100 consecutive days."

Annie says now that this idea was spontaneous but perfectly serious: "We slept on it - joked about it - then the next morning I woke up and thought, we should really do that."

They resolved to begin their marathon on January 1, 2006. Among other things, they made a commitment to turn off the television, and not to read magazines or surf the internet. "For all we knew, maybe we couldn't do it," says Doug. "And if we could, by the end, we might loathe each other."

"I never remember thinking, I need the end result to be this," adds Annie when asked what she imagined a sex boot camp might do for their relationship. "We'd throw ourselves into it and see what happened." But she also wondered if there was such a thing as too much sex. "I woke up one day thinking, 'What are we going to do on day 33?'"

There is no awkwardness on display, nor do the Browns use euphemisms when they talk or write about sex. Doug's book is not pornographic but is highly detailed, covering everything from favoured positions ("I can't believe we never had end-of-the-bed-sex," says Annie), sex with and without Viagra - he likes it; she's lukewarm - to Annie's Brazilian wax.

"We both came from healthy marriages that came with good sex lives," says Annie. "My mother passed away in April, and my father was telling me about their last intimate experience two weeks before she died," she says, laughing.

Doug is so open with his parents that he told them about their sex marathon before it began. "Honey, that's a classic," was his mother's response.

"That's awesome," said his father.

Annie told her parents by email. But it was the reaction of friends and colleagues that proved telling. "Most of my girlfriends were sceptical," recalls Annie. "They were probing me, 'How are you going to do it?'"

Doug's male friends were far more impressed. "It was, 'Hey, buddy, that's great!' I don't think I had a single searching question from a man. It was very jokey." One friend called Doug after a month to ask, "Are you sore yet? Burning?"

"What was interesting was that whenever we told people about the marathon they would offer details about their own sex lives. People we had known for years would confess, 'Oh yes, we do it once a week too.'"

To start off their project, the Browns began reading about sex, visiting their respective doctors for check-ups and advice. Doug suggested visiting a sex shop for ideas for when things got boring. Then they assembled oils, candles, lubricants, libido-enhancing herbs and sex toys to aid in their mutual seduction. "And Doug bought me some sexy lingerie," says Annie. That was a first.

Family photographs were removed from their bedroom to make it more sex den, less rest area. (It's hard to get in the mood when your parents and children are staring at you.) Doug also began working out and forgoing heavy dinners to conserve energy for later. Plans were made for trips to mitigate boredom - by the end of the marathon, the Browns had had sex at a pornography exhibition in Las Vegas (a work assignment for Doug) in an ashram, a yurt, numerous hotels and on a mountain top.

The Browns had every recognisable permutation of married sex: fireworks, boring, tired, Viagra-assisted and angry. Regarding the latter, contrary to popular belief, they found that sex after a fight was not good. There was sex after a bout of vertigo (Doug), sex in the basement with their daughter upstairs watching The Wiggles. There was sex on an exercise ball and sex after watching porn (which Annie says did nothing for her).

At home they locked their bedroom door during marathon hours, but things didn't always go according to plan. Once, just as they got going, they heard their youngest's door click open. Battling a cough, she was heading in their direction. Doug quickly left the room, administered cough syrup then "pirouetted from Caring Dad to Horny Husband the instant I returned to the bedroom, the moment I saw Annie on the bed".

About 60 days in, they lost interest in sex. At times, both were too tired to contemplate it. "I'd rather hit the sack tonight, to be honest," Annie pleaded one evening. But still they had sex. Even if it was just a quickie; the continuous sex reignited interest. "The thing I noticed was you can't just get into bed and jump on top of each other - you have to get in the mood," says Doug. "We found that the way we did that was sitting on the bed, talking. We really talked more than in a long time."

Some of those discussions raised topics they had never broached in all their years together. "What about bondage?" he asked her when they discussed what they might explore. "It's not my thing," Annie replied. "I don't want to be tied up."

It didn't interest him much either. So no bondage. And no threesomes. "Never," says Doug. "That's not part of the adventure."

Annie confessed that she sometimes felt body conscious in bed. "Like, if my body isn't like a movie star's I am not going to be a turn on. But he never did get turned off and that was reaffirming." For Doug a big issue was anxiety. "I think this is common with men. I felt I had to perform, I was on stage and had to score 10. But if you're obsessed with performance it's not as enjoyable as it should be."

Says Annie: "I never knew Doug was anxiety-ridden about his performance and that was a revelation. I thought, why is he anxious? It's just me."

"The good thing was that the anxiety melted quickly during the 101 days," says Doug. "I realised you can't be on stage every day."

Despite some days with little erotic charge, overall the Browns claim they felt a connection they hadn't tapped into in years. "We communicated better. We were definitely kinder to each other," says Annie.

Sometimes this was born of necessity. A fight during the day had to be defused by nightfall if they were to have sex. "Before, if we fought, it easily could go through the night and the next day," says Annie. "Maybe we would have had more arguments if we hadn't done this."

As for their two daughters, though they were mercifully unaware of what was going on, Annie did voice concerns that, with their trips away, coffee dates and the rush through bedtime (so she and Doug could have sex), the girls would feel neglected. Today, she says, laughing, "no permanent damage" was done. Their older daughter knows they have written a book "about how much Mum and Dad love each other" but Doug is fairly sure neither of them will read it when they are older. "If my father had written this I wouldn't read it. But we both felt the book had to be done. It's important."

On day 100, the Browns were quite giddy with the thought that it was over. They could read a magazine again! Go to sleep! Around 11pm they started joking in their bedroom that they were too tired for sex and maybe they should skip it. Then they started up. At 11.28pm Annie shouted, "We did it!"

Then, meanly, a friend encouraged them to do one more round for good luck. Minutes before midnight on day 101, they ended the marathon. "The 100th erotic encounter had seemed like a party," writes Doug, "but number 101 felt like a stray commitment agreed to long ago and half forgotten."

Then, with their sexathon finally over, they didn't go near each other for a month. Annie got back into reading, and Doug could enjoy fish and chips with a beer without feeling guilty. But soon, Annie confessed that she missed the marathon: "The intensity and closeness."

There hasn't been another since, although there is discussion of a week-long mini-marathon some time soon. "But we never fell back into the old pattern," says Doug. "We don't have sex every night now (it has slipped back to around six times a month) but it's looser and we are conscious of it."

Do they ever think there might have been an easier way to revive their marriage? A holiday, or a skiing trip, perhaps? Annie's not buying it. "I now see the physical in a relationship is the foundation, it's the glue," she reiterates.

"And it's free!" says Doug.