This past weekend my wife Sue and I traveled to Decorah, Iowa and Luther College, the small institution I attended from 1975-1979. We made our way first to Madison, Wisconsin, to ride a loop of the Ironman Wisconsin course, stayed the night in Verona, and drove across the Southwest part of the state to Prairie du Chien, where it started to cloud up, then rain. I’ve driven through all kinds of weather on that road and that route over the last fifty years after a first trip to Northeast Iowa in the company of my father Stewart, who thought my enrollment at Augustana College was just fine, but something told him that the college in Decorah, Iowa, might be the better choice.

It was already late June or early July when my dad and I drove up through Lancaster and Platteville to Decorah. I’d visited Augie and ran with the track team that spring, met guys like their All-American Dan Copper, and interviewed with their coach, Paul Olson. It all seemed fine and good, but then came the financial aid offer and a warning letter that I’d have to be on Academic Probation the first semester because I had a C+ average in high school.

Maybe my dad knew that I was less excited to attend Augustana once that news came along. Plus a close friend named Paul Morlock signed up for Luther, and my dad probably talked to his dad about visiting Luther, and so on. We took the risk on a hot summer day and drove in our 1967 Buick Wildcat to arrive in Decorah and have lunch downtown before a campus visit.

Never met the guy…

I share all this as an introduction to the passing of our Luther cross-country coach Kent Finanger, who lived to the age of 94 in one of the most fulfilling and valuable lives of any person I’ve ever known. Apparently he was out of town that day my father and I visited Luther, so I’d never met him before arriving on campus. We did talk on the phone once, and he explained how I’d be joining some highly talented runners in the freshman class. I didn’t fear that fact, but I can’t say I had much of an idea what that might mean in the future. As it turned out, it meant everything in the future.

I joined Paul Mullen of Rochester, Minnesota, Dani Fjelstad of Albert Lea, Iowa, Keith Ellingson, a hometown boy from Decorah, and Eric Inbody of Palatine, Illinois. We were a class of incoming freshman who had all run under 15:00 for three miles in high school. Except for me. I was more like a 15:20 guy, never made it downstate, but had led several teams to district and conference championships in cross-country. But just as importantly, Kent welcomed runners who weren’t necessarily the fastest at their high school or top prospects. Kent loved every runner on the team, including Jim Nielsen, who became my table tennis partner and buddy at Ylvisaker dorm.

That first year at Luther, our cross country team became a mix of upperclassmen and freshman who won the Iowa Conference by placing our top five runners 1-5. Our sixth many got 7th, and I placed 9th. All seven runners in the Top 10.

While results say quite a bit about the recruiting and coaching job that Kent Finanger did for Luther College, it was his leadership and motivational style that were in some ways his greatest legacy. By the time our group became sophomores, we were joined by a fifth competitive runner in our class named Steve Corson, a transfer from football to cross-country.

All of us had our ups and down during four years at Luther. That’s distance running. Between injuries and college pressures, it’s natural to have off days now and then in a 13-meet season. Kent was used to that, having coached a team to 4th in the nation already, with talented All-American runners coming out of the program. But think of the challenges in guiding 20-30 young men and women training between 50-100 miles a week. Managing their emotions, wins and losses, health, and interests. Kent did that for a total of 93 seasons including his track-and-field, cross-country, and basketball coaching. The dedication of the man was incredible.

I’ve written previously in this blog about the joy of placing second in Division III cross-country nationals. Yet Kent saw us nearly “lose it” with late-season negativity, and commanded us to run one night “without talking,” to clear our minds after an iffy fifth place in regionals, the last to advance. Yet under his guidance we rose to the occasion at (of all places, for me) Augustana-Rock Island. However their coach Paul Olson was a Luther grad himself, so he was as happy for Kent Finanger as if his team own team had placed second. Well, almost anyway.

A National Championship at Last

Two years later, Luther placed third with another lineup of high-quality runners. Then in 1985, the team won a national championship, and one of Kent’s lifetime goals was certainly met.

One of his runners from that team, Stephan Sandness, became a Lutheran pastor serving his church for decades. After a stirring eulogy from Kent’s grandson Lars Finanger, Pastor Sandness brought us into a sphere of contemplation inside Luther’s Center for Faith and Life, a building that was nothing more than a hole in the ground when I entered Luther fifty-one years ago in 1975.

He talked about the miracle of Jesus changing water into wine, and how Jesus was just one of the guests at a wedding when his mother urged him into action when the wine ran out. That story, he explained, captured a moment of “Jesus being Jesus.” In other words, not begging for attention, but ever keen to raise people’s consciousness about the world we live in. That passage explores the idea of provision and abundance, much like many of Jesus’ parables. It speaks to the power of faith as implemented in both belief and action. Think: The mustard seed that grows into a great tree. The spread of the yeast in the dough to make it rise.

Kent believed that planting seeds is often all it took to foster growth in people young and old. That didn’t mean we didn’t experience what anyone might call “growing pains.” We experienced many wins, but also suffered disappointments at the team and individual level. We weren’t coddled. Kent was not afraid to point out a missed opportunity or a marginal effort. The truth was all there to read in his mimeographed daily workout sheets and meet reviews.

He sometimes hilariously pointed out a weak effort with a hyperbolic dig in the voice of another team looking at our results, as in, “Look at Cuds! Central says, “He’s finished this year! He doesn’t have another good race in him! Oh man! There’s Corson! Up one week! Down the next! And where’s Fjelstad? Is he hurt again? And yes, Ellingson went out slow! Let’s leave him behind!”

And so on. We all got a laugh out of his jibes, but the points were well taken. Kent knew that we could all run better and he pressed us to do so. For me, that was always a question of self-confidence and self perception. Kent knew there was more to me than I’d sometimes admit. He’d quietly let us know those motivational points with notes placed in our SPO (Student Post Office) box. “This is YOUR WEEK CUDS! RUN WITH CONFIDENCE! WOW! FUN! WOW!”

Faith alignment

All of this background aligns with the biblical example Pastor Sandness provided to explore the methods of Kent Finanger and how they aligned with putting his faith into action. When it came to providing insights on how to succeed, Sandness related, “He was Kent being Kent.”

He explained that Kent had a great belief in affirming and serving others, and he trusted that if given a chance or opportunity, and explained in the right way, people responded. For example, in part as an expression in his belief in Fitness For Life, Kent started Luther’s women’s cross-country program the same year I entered college. It grew quickly, and he coached both men’s and women’s teams, prescribing workouts and encouraging every single runner in the program, from slowest to fastest. Within a decade or two, the women’s programs had national champions like Tureena Johnson, whose statistics read like a Live Photo of Kent Finanger’s motivational power.

Seven-time NCAA III All-American, twice in cross country and five times in track and field
• NCAA III All-American in cross country – 1995, 1996
• NCAA III individual national champion in cross country – 1996
• Iowa Conference cross country MVP – 1995, 1996
• National champion 10,000 outdoors – 1996, 1997
• National champion 5000 outdoors – 1997
• National champion 5000 indoors – 1997
• National runner-up indoors 5000 – 1996
• Helped lead Luther to its only Iowa Conference track and field championship and a fourth place finish at national meet – 1997
• Iowa Conference track and field MVP – 1997
• Honda Award for the NCAA Division III Athlete of the Year – 1997

Yet while Kent produced and celebrated champions like Johnson, he was a staunch defender of the value of every runner out there on the course. I recall showing up at a meet at Mankato State in Minnesota our freshman year and hearing their brusque coach pronounce “You’ll only get times at the first mile mark. The rest of the way you’re on your own.”

That was anathema to Coach Finanger, who openly bristled in our huddle and before the race started, sent our manager out to give mile times at two and four, while Kent raced out to mile three. That’s how much he valued every runner on the team. Everyone deserved splits.

That’s a powerful metaphor for life itself. Jesus was a defender of everyone in the “race of life.” That was Jesus being Jesus. And that was Kent being Kent.

Singing and Playing his Praises

At the start of the funeral service a single flautist, his grandchild Elizabeth Finanger, played an elegaic tune while walking down the steps toward the stage. She joined her brother Hans onstage and they began banjo part an ukelele together. The music felt mystic and perfect. Early in the service, Kent’s son Phil Finanger provided a solo of Borning Cry previously recorded in a professional studio.

A soloist Emily Secor later performed the Lord’s Prayer in song, and in a surprising song near the end of the service, we heard the recorded voice of Kent Finanger himself singing the Lord’s Prayer. He was saying goodbye in all the right ways.

A calling to life

But we did not leave without a calling, which is fitting given the many times Kent Finanger shared a TFTD––Thought For the Day. As Stephan Sandness invited us to consider bring Kents “life to life” in our own worlds. In a way, it was a call to “go forth” and “be like Kent.”

Personally, this all aligned with my own relationship to faith and life. In my first theology book titled The Genesis Fix, I wrote about the concept of what I call “grace appreciated.” As in, “appreciate” grace by accepting it with gratitude, and “appreciate it” by seeking to grow grace it in an active sense. That’s exactly what Kent did.

That book led to a collaboration with another Luther College legend, Dr. Richard Simon Hanson, who picked up a copy of my Genesis Fix book when I held an art show at Luther and sold it through the Luther Book Shop. Professor Hanson marked up a copy with enthusiastic comments, and later sent me a typewritten manuscript of his own, titled Religion From Earth. Our theology was so similar that we collaborated by including his treatise in my second theology book, Honest-To-Goodness.

Serendipitous goodness

I think back to the serendipity of my father choosing to drive me up to Luther “in case I liked it” back in the early part of summer, 1975. Showing up that fall provided excitement and challenge, and tested every fiber of my being. Yet one of the other impactful aspects of beginning life at Luther College was the classroom experience, and first hearing the words, “The unexamined faith is not worth having.”

One of the first chapel talks I heard at Luther was in fact given by Dr. Simon Hanson. I was so impressed with his ideas that I wrote home about it, explaining to my parents that like me, he believed strongly in the convergence between earthly wisdom and faith, and that the two were not mutually exclusive.

Hard, clean severe

I believe Kent Finanger had a parallel mission and it was centered around the idea of “sound mind and body,” and that taking care of ourselves in a physically active way was another form of honoring the gifts we receive from God.

Those gifts certainly differ in degree and expression among individuals, but a form of personal and profound truth emerges when someone engages in a sport such as running, which the great distance runner and author Kenny Moore once described as “hard, clean, and severe.”

There’s an honesty like no other that comes from competing your hardest in any endeavor, and then living with the results. Plus, you are much less prone to lie about your efforts when they’re right there in mimeograph form.

Encouraging words

Yet when they’re also marked with a comment such as “Great race, Cuds!” and you’ve worked through 70-90 mile weeks for weeks on end, rising at 5:30 am for a morning run and showing up for practice after a day of classes to go running with 20-30 other guys in the unforgiving hills of Decorah, you come to know your mind pretty well. A bit of your soul is exposed too.

But as Pastor Sandness noted in his sermon, when Kent popped out of his car to urge us on, we felt a surge of pride in what we were doing. During my freshman year our team ran south from Decorach to Calmar and back, a proposed 20-mile roundtrip run. Not all of us made it. I ran for 15 miles and hopped in the van with some others. But somewhere in the first 6-7 miles were were climbing a hill on highway 52 going south when a small herd of horses came charging along a beside us next to a fenceline. Kent called out the window, “Go Horses, Go!” I was never sure if he was talking to the band of runners he was guiding by car, or talking to the beasts running through the field. It didn’t matter. We knew that Kent always loved his horses one way or another.

So that’s it. A testament to a longtime influence, coach, and friend in Kent Finanger. I still chuckle that he called me one time before his annual Arizona-based Luther Golf Outing, saying, “Cuds, I need you to make a painting for the auction. Here is what I want. A Luther basketball player in 1950s uniform at Preus Gymnasium. A Luther football player, and a Luther Cross-country man. In your art. Can you do that?”

I assured him that I could, and contacted the Luther Alumni office for help in getting reference photos for the painting. I produced a 16 X 20″ acrylic and shipped it down to Kent’s place in Arizona. He called me up. “Perfect, Cuds. Perfect. Wow Fun Wow!” he enthused.

A week later he called with a bit of mischief in his voice. “Hi Cuds. I want you to know that I bid on your painting and bought it! It will look great in my house.”

I smiled, realizing that it was his plan all along to buy that painting. It made me happy to think that I’d been able to honor his wishes. A few years before, I’d done a watercolor of the Five Horses from the Class of ’79: Fjelstad, Ellingson, Corson, Mullen, and Cudworth. I did a simple birthday card for him on his 90th.

We had some great times together, and sadly, we have now lost both Keith Ellingson and Kent Finanger to time. Those two lived right across the street from each other in Decorah. I’ve always thought Kent was especially proud of his hometown flyer, Keith Ellingson.

Keith, Kent, and I had some strange parallels in life. Kent lost his first wife Lucia to cancer. Years later, Keith lost his wife Kristi to ovarian cancer. And in 2013, I lost my late wife Linda to ovarian cancer as well. We all knew pain in our lives. To Keith’s credit, he endured Parkinson’s Disease for many years before Lewy-body dementia. But I can tell you this: that guy never lost his quick wit or sense of humor as we held conversations online and by phone, sharing laughs. Keith and I were roommates our freshman year at Ylvisaker. We both worked Admissions for Luther College too, and served as Class Agents for years as well. Luther Blue Bloods, you might say.

My life paralleled with Kent as well. He found love again with Lois Dahl. They shared many wonderful decades of life together. In some respects, that served as a model for me, as I met my wife Linda Suzanne Astra on a dating app called FitnessSingles.com. We are both triathletes; swimming, biking, and running together, and many other loves as well. Kent expressed happiness for me there too.

I’m grateful for many things in life. This is a long word of gratitude for having experienced growth and change under the tutelage of Kent Finanger. He was always a great believer in celebrating one’s own birthday, saying, “Hooray! It’s my day!” And he believed in ownership of one’s achievements, and I can say that one of the prouder aspects of my life was to step forward as a team leader that senior year in cross-country when injuries afflicted two of our classmates. I was proud because Kent always knew there was a bit more there than what I’d showed despite running on the Varsity all three years before. Finally, I came into my own as a runner that fall, and that’s all Kent Finanger wanted for all of us. To find ourselves in new and better ways.

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