This past weekend I traveled to Decorah, Iowa to watch the conference cross country championship held at Luther College, my alma mater. I joined two long-ago teammates, Paul Mullen and Dani Fjelstad, to have dinner on Friday night and watch the meet on Saturday morning. We were joined at dinner by our former coach Bob Naslund, for whom the college fieldhouse will be named after its renovation.
At dinner, we talked about old times and shared some classic tales of competitions won and lost. We also talked about how things have changed about Luther and college running over the years. Our school is no longer the dominant conference powerhouse in cross country or track and field. There are a host of reasons for that and proposed cures in terms of recruiting and such, but that does not mean there are not good things happening for Luther College runners. The cross country and track directors Steve and Yarrow Pasche do an excellent job coaching runners and have success every year. This is no “alumni complaint” about things not being what they used to be. Quite the opposite.
While us old guys and gals are proud of our era, we also recognize that things were not perfect in those days. This weekend, we discussed how often we overtrained or ran too hard, or too often. We lamented some of the unnecessary injuries that resulted from those tactics.
It’s a fact of the sport injuries and bad luck come to everyone. Just this week, one of Luther’s top women tore her ACL during a pre-race skit. She attended the race in a full leg brace. I walked over to console her and relate that I’ve been through that injury and come back strong. I could see the competitor in her aching to run that day. The fact of the matter is that in running, shit happens.
The Wartburg pack leads the race at 800 meters.
The other truth about running is that times do change. It was odd for us long-graduated Luther guys to watch the Wartburg teams sweep the top spots at the conference meet. Their pack in both the men’s and women’s race was deep and impressive. I don’t doubt that our 1978 team that placed second at nationals could give them a run if we were to transport forward in time, but kudos to the Warts for assembling a program worthy of a #1 national ranking. Whatever they’re doing appears to be working.
My Luther teammates and I were wondering if Wartburg would be able to match the feat that we achieved by sweeping the Top 5 places in the conference meet back in 1975. They didn’t, but they came darn close.
The most impressive performance of the day came from a runner representing Loras College. Kassie Parker ran to a half-mile victory with a time of 20:43.0 over 6000 meters. She appeared to be flying in the home stretch. Though she’s a Division III runner, I predict that we’ll hear about her competing for national teams in a few years.
Though the Luther women’s team was wracked by late-season injuries, they ran well as a pack and coach Yarrow Pasche was pleased with their effort. The program grew from the two first women to run cross country at Luther my freshman year to a team that embraces the sport with enthusiasm and good numbers. That’s really what the sport is about for most runners.
Later, at the cross country picnic following the race, we met with Luther parents (still younger than us!) and some recent alumni runners. It is interesting to move amongst those people and realize that it was our parents mingling together 40+ years ago. They were just as happy that their young men and women were competing in a positive fashion and growing in life.
It’s still a beautiful sport and always will be. When the gun goes off and a hundred or so runners go running across a green field on a fall day, there is no place in the world, or in time, that I’d rather be.
The 1975 season saw plenty of jostling among the top ten runners to remain in the Top 7. Everyone had their ups and downs, but one runner in particular, my roommate Keith Ellingson, started coming into his own. At a dual meet in LaCrosse, he was our top man against a powerful team led by Joe Hanson, whose twin brother Jim made up a fearsome duo. Ellingson ran 26:10 over the five-mile distance, which seemed to suit him even better than the four-mile races we’d been doing.
My painting of Keith Ellingson for a memorium at Luther College.
I’d been running sixth and seventh man most of the season, running times in the low 27:00 range for five miles. Our other promising freshman Dani Fjelstad fought some injuries, and even Ellingson had a toenail removed mid-season. He came back to the room and pulled the bandage off his toe for a new one. The spot where the nail had been was bloody, red, and pulpy. I wondered how he’d run at all the next day. But he did.
Keith was a funny guy by nature. Extremely wry and quick-witted. He also had a funny knack of complaining in a way that you never knew if he was serious or not. But this time, I knew his toe hurt plenty, so I tried helping him out with stuff. We ran within a few seconds of each other at a triangular meet at Wartburg where he ran fifth man and I ran sixth. I don’t recall being jealous of his rising up the ranks. I could only be concerned with my own efforts.
That wasn’t the case with everyone on the team. Some inter-team rivalries cost more in terms of personal relationships. There were always certain guys on our squad to whom I did not like to lose. While we were all running for the same cause as a team, I admit to viewing myself as a superior runner to teammates on the cusp of the Top 7. I think that kind of comes with the territory in distance running. Nothing much can change that.
It also worked the other way around. I got a thrill out of seeing certain teammates achieve success. And when Paul Mullen and Keith Ellingson, two of my freshman class teammates, took 1-2 in a dual against Loras with Dave Hanson third, Mike Smock fourth, and Damian Archbold fifth, it was pretty cool to see things go good for all of them. We had a perfect score in that meet. I hated that hilly course, and ran 28:00, but still qualified as our seventh man behind Kirk Neubauer.
In this photo Luther runners at the front appear, from left to right: Dani Fjelstad, Paul Mullen, Christ Cudworth, Doug Peterson and Mike Smock (in hat).
I finally cracked the Top 5 at the Carthage Invitational, held at a park called Petrifying Springs outside Kenosha, Wisconsin. Our top guy Doug Peterson ran 26:08 and I ran 27:00 behind Smock, Ellingson, and Mullen. It felt great to finally count as one of our scoring runners. We finished fifth behind Western Michigan, Northwestern, Stevens-Point, and Wisconsin-Parkside. All far bigger schools.
We were coming together as a team, yet some of our collective judgment was lacking. On the way back from the Carthage meet we engaged in college kid antics that were both dumb and dangerous. Some things you only learn by experience. Exceeding one’s capacity for risk-taking and stupidity is one of them. We were fortunate to make it all the way back home.
Conference time
Finally, the day came for the IIAC Conference meet. Luther had already won the conference for four straight years under Coach Finanger’s guidance. Yet due to the graduation of two top-level runners, Tim Williamson and Steve Murray, the rest of the conference thought they had a shot at us in 1975.
As it turned out, the Luther College cross country program was not depleted. It had merely reloaded. We traveled to Oskaloosa, Iowa, to race at William Penn College (now University). The course was an up and down affair with long stretches and abrupt turns. By that point of the season, I’d earned enough points to tie with Kirk Neubauer as our seventh man. Graciously, Kirk suggested that I be given the chance to run as part of the development of the team. That showed Kirk’s vision and grace. He would later go on to coach successfully in the Luther College running programs.
An interview with Coach Finanger after the IIAC conference meet.
The honor of running in the conference race was not lost on me. As a team, we talked through a plan to run together the first mile. We rolled in a pack to a 4:55 mile. That must have been a daunting sight to the remainder of the runners in the conference. Just blue and white, in a horde. We weren’t behaving arrogantly. We were running a smart race.
The course went uphill and from there, the Luther pack split up. My goal was to finish in the Top 10. As it turned out, all seven of our runners finished in the Top 10. I was ninth. Our first five guys of Doug Peterson, Keith Ellingson, Paul Mullen, Dave Hanson, and Damian Archbold ran to a perfect score of 15 points. Mike Smock and I both finished within a minute of our lead guy Peterson over the five-mile course.
The Decorah newspaper had a nice profile on Coach Kent and the hometown boy, Keith Ellingson.
Thinking back on the race, I recall a conversation about it with my late buddy Keith Ellingson. During the last year, I spent quite a bit of time on the phone with him. Through the fall of 2020, he’d been dealing with Parkinson’s disease for nearly ten years. Then came another diagnosis of Lewy Body Dementia. He was in assisted living and during the Covid-19 pandemic, was not allowed visits from his family. His girls missed being able to be close with him, and their children too.
Keith with his daughters Bailey, Jessica, and Catie. No one loved family more than Keith.
For all that thickening of body and mind, Keith kept up his interest in sports and distance running. Following graduation from Luther, he had moved into coaching and developed more than 60 athletes into All-Americans during a Hall of Fame career at Simpson College. Over the first months of 2021, we talked about his coaching and laughed about our college days and beyond. We’d both worked in college admissions for Luther. Then we both served as Class Agents. So we’d kept in touch off and on.
Keith and I also had one common tragedy in common. We both lost wives to ovarian cancer when they were in their fifties. I knew his wife Kristi well from having met her all those years ago when they were young and dating in college. They got to know my late wife Linda quite well through many meetups at Luther reunions and such. When both women were going through cancer treatment, and we crossed paths at reunions, the two of them talked softly with each other about their respective challenges. Kristi’s mousy-brown hair turned silver and curly when it grew back after chemotherapy. My wife Linda’s hair fell out several times over eight years of treatment.
So Keith and I had many things to talk about during the last months of his life. But I recall one quiet evening he began talking about that Iowa conference meet where Luther swept the top five spots and Keith took second. As a junior, he would win the conference in a tie race with Paul Mullen. Yet there was something special, Keith insisted, about the dominating win and the perfect score. “I don’t think anyone will ever replicate that,” he told me. It was a perfect score for the ages.
The thing about distance running is that you never, ever know what can happen. Our team was proof that year of the capacity to rebound during a year in which were perhaps expected to lose. Perhaps there was a life lesson in that for Keith and the rest of us. We’d done something special, but nothing is ever truly “perfect” in this world. We certainly weren’t. Not as a team. Not as individuals. But we came together on a cloudy day at the height of our youth and accomplished something unique. That wasn’t the last time we’d enjoyed success. Yet sometimes the first victory is the sweetest.
So here’s to Keith Ellingson and his appreciation of perfection wherever one can find it, make it, or live it. God Bless you, Keith.
Dual meets were often mano-a-mano affairs versus the madness of large invitationals.
Those first few weeks of cross country competition as a freshman in college always features ups and down. At our most important early season meet, the Luther All-American Invite, I ran a credible 21:23 four-mile on the rolling home course. That left me as ninth man overall because two runners in the JV race including freshman Eric Inbody beat me. He ran 21:09 in the JV race.
I bounced up and down in the Top 7 those first few meets, so it was a bit of a downer to be sent with the JV team to a meet with the University of Northern Iowa. I shouldn’t have been disappointed, as capable runners like Keith Ellingson and Dave Hanson also traveled to the meet. In any case, I was determined to run well to prove myself worthy. The day was overcast and gray. When the gun went off, I felt strong from the start. In fact, I gravitated to the front, unlike other races in which I’d competed that season. One of our worst enemies in running is a limited self-perception, as in…thinking that other runners belong in front of you. That is a good way to get left behind.
I raced along with two UNI guys and finished third overall in 20:52, our top guy and my second-best time of the season. My roommate Keith Ellingson ran 21:05 and Hanson was our third guy at 21:09. It felt a bit liberating to run without the burden of keeping up with our top guys ahead of me. As Kent Finanger told me often that year, that’s how I should always run. “Let yourself feel the pace of the day,” he advised.
A bird moment
As I raced along at UNI, the course turned around a golf pond and I glanced down to see a strange bird spinning around the water. As a birder with a growing life list at that age, I almost paused to get a positive ID. All I knew was that it was a late-arriving phalarope, a species of shorebird that to that point in my birding career I had never seen before. I craned my neck around to study the bird as long as I could, but at 5:15 mile pace with a mile still to go in the race, my running priorities won out.
This time, following the race, I actually got to turn around and watch the rest of our dedicated team members come in the chute. Jim Holt, Wayne Monson, Brad Stene, and Tony Amabile. Mark Finanger (the coach’s son) and Bill Higgins. He was followed that day by a runner that the year before was one of our top guys. Now he was running in the middle of the pack in the JV races. What was up with that?
He perplexed me. But as time went by, we all realized what was going on with him. He’d developed a habit of smoking pot. He was high most of the time, even during workouts. His eyes were often red, and he was definitely unmotivated compared to the guy who ran in the top tier at the NCAA meet the year before.
It would have been a good thing to have conducted some kind of intervention with him. Perhaps there were other things going in his life that held him back or caused him to self-medicate. I could be all wrong, but the 1:1 relationship was obvious to most. Like many other people in that era, he was hooked on pot and couldn’t give it up. He was not alone. We had other runners at Luther that got too into drinking or smoking pot as well. I’ve read many times that marijuana is not an addictive drug. I don’t buy it, having witnessed both friends and associates try to come to grips with it over time. Certainly, alcohol is an addictive substance. Pot is too. In any event, it was always tough to watch a guy like our teammate succumb to its powers, especially considering all the talent that guy had.
Along the way, I’d have my own negative experiences with partying. But that comes later.
The Dedicated Crew
I’m pretty sure the guys that finished just behind him that day at UNI would gladly have absorbed his talent for their own hard-working purposes. My big friend Walt Maakestad ran 22:56 at UNI. Dennis McCann, Jim Nielsen, and Dan Knutson finished out our squad, all running just over 6:00 miles for the four-mile race. That’s credible stuff, if you ask me.
The point behind sharing that story is that every guy in the Luther cross country program was highly valued by Coach Finanger. We ran a meet at Mankato that season, driving up from Iowa to Minnesota on an increasingly chilly afternoon for a race on their campus. The seasons seemed to change even as we drove north with the trees finishing their fall colors the further we drove. There were long lines of bright yellow beech trees out on the cross-country course. A chill breeze blew out of the Northwest.
As we lined up for the race, Mankato’s coach announced that split times would only be given to the top runners at the mile markers. “The rest of you are on your own,” was his message that day. I saw Kent Finanger slap his clipboard on his thigh in disgust. “No!” he muttered half under his breath. The decision to skip mile times for the rest of the team was not acceptable to Kent. I think he sent our equipment manager out to one of the mile markers with a watch. Somehow there were other people shouting times as we ran around the course. Kent believed that every single runner on that course deserved the same level of respect.
When the horse smells the barn…
That message that everyone matters got through clear and strong to our team every day in practice. That said, there were still grumblings if one of the guys outside the Top 7 took the lead and picked up the pace on a day that was supposed to be slower. But we all had the tendency to race home in the last mile. When that happened, someone would mutter, “Uh oh, the horse smell’s the barn…” and off we’d all go, running like a bunch of madmen on Pole Line Road back to campus.
I liked all the guys on that team, but a runner named Jim Nielsen and I spent loads of time together around the freshmen dorm. We both loved playing table tennis. During the evening we invested many hours in the rec room challenging each other in ping pong for the fun and competition of it. That was our own little world, that ping pong table. We ultimately entered the college tournament and finished second in a doubles match against two superior Asian players. I wound up playing for the college championship against a tennis star named Jeff Renken. He beat me by a few points to claim the title, but I gave him a good match.
Our four-mile meets were all used up by mid-season. It was time to graduate to running five miles in competition, all with our sights set on winning the conference meet in a few weeks time.
With several weeks of running in the tank, it was time for the team Intrasquad meet. Everyone knew it was coming because the course was marked out by the loyal campus groundskeeper. There was just one problem. He was a bit cross-eyed. The first mile of the line marking the course on the massive intramural field sometimes turned out wavy.
That wavy line got some interesting attention in other years. I recall standing at the start of the Luther All-American Invitational a few seasons later. The teams were all lined up, and an Augustana runner looked ahead at the curvy white line crossing the IM field and asked, “What the hell?”
I looked over at him, smiled, and said, “Just run straight. That’s our groundskeeper. He can’t see right.”
Off course
As the Intrasquad approached, I was feeling good about my prospects of making the Top 7. But the Thursday evening before the Saturday race, I began to run a temperature. Sweat covered my body and nausea caught up with me. I had the flu. It was bad.
I struggled over to the Student Health Center and checked in with the nurse. She plopped me in a room with a bedpan and a couple thick sheets to wait it out. It was Friday evening by then, and I could hear the college kids ramming around campus getting ready to have fun that night. All I could think about in those moments was trying not to throw up again. The more I thought about not throwing up, the more I threw up. That is the yin and yang of the flu.
Clearly, I was going to be in bad shape and probably miss the Intrasquad race. Something in me still thought it might be possible to run, but a long Friday night passed and I asked the nurse to pass along word to Coach Kent Finanger that I was out of commission. He likely knew that already, since I’d missed practice Friday afternoon.
That night in the health center was filled with a delirious reaction to the fever. I dreamed that I was back at the farmhouse where my Uncle Kermit and Aunt Margaret lived in Upstate New York. That dream came about because the Luther nurse had a high voice much like my aunt, who I loved so much because they took care of me when my mother was ill after the birth of my younger brother, who arrived breach into the world.
My work from Life Drawing class in the fall of 1975.
The flu finally broke on Saturday afternoon. I lay there in the greasy-feeling sheets for an hour or two. My condition went back and forth between feeling better and having that low, sinking feeling that it would all come back again. Beyond the running I’d missed, it occurred to me that there was a biology assignment due that Monday morning. I’d missed some lab notes and would have to copy them from someone. Such is the yin and yang of college life.
On Sunday morning I gingerly walked back across campus, stopped to nibble some food at the college cafeteria, and returned to the Ylvisaker dorm room where my roommate Keith Ellingson filled me in on who ran what at the Intrasquad meet. Our team leader Doug Peterson ran 20:53 to win the race. Damian Archbold was second in 20:56. Dave Hanson ran third in 21:47. Paul Mullen (a freshman) ran fourth in 21:51. Dani Fjelstad, another freshman, ran 21:52 and Steven Inbody, the older brother of another freshman from our class, ran sixth in 21:52 as well. Kirk Neubauer was seventh in 21:59.
I was left wondering how I’d have placed in that array of Luther guys. All I could do was get back into training and plan for the next meet. Come Monday, I hopped back in with the guys and felt remarkably good running a ten-miler out to the trout farm south of town and back. It stunned me to think that I could feel so good on that run after feeling so awful and crappy just two days before. Yin and yang.
Getting the flu meant that I had to wait until September 13 to run an actual college race. We took second as a team behind Carleton, beating St. Olaf, Winona, and Macalester. I was the seventh man that day in 21:11, not a bad effort for a first-ever college cross country race.
Non-scholarship running
That first semester at Luther also introduced me to the world of campus employment. My college aid package included a portion of loans, but also Work-Study funds that had to be earned each term. I was assigned to the Dish Room at the Union cafeteria. Work started at 5:30 a.m. and lasted a few hours. My work-study program required me to work three times a week. Pay was $1.10 per hour. Annual tuition at Luther was about $3700 per year.
I’d show up for dish room duty sleepy and tired from running the night before. None of us talked much during those morning shifts. We were all too tired and grumpy to care. The kitchen operation was overseen by a taciturn woman named Gladys, whose opinion of students seemed to border between viewing us as “necessary” and “evil.” The Dark Side of yin and yang.
I particularly hated working in the dishroom where the steaming hot plates came out of a giant industrial dishwasher on a belt that never stopped. We weren’t issued any rubber gloves to protect our hands from the heat emanating from the plates. I tried waiting for the plates to move down the incline enough to cool off, but that created additional pressure to unload them in time. It was a living hell to me. Gladys would walk over and stare at you if they dishes backed up at all. My hands and fingertips ached with pain from the constant flow of hot dishes. More than once I cursed her under my breath.
Cooking for dollars
Whenever I could, I weasled my way over to work the cooking stations where we dumped liquified eggs out of gallon jugs to scramble them on giant grills. I liked that work, and making English Muffins too. But Gladys would always pull me back to the damned demon of a dishwasher. I despised that machine. And her, quite frankly.
Certainly, that job taught me the value of work, but it didn’t help my distance running any. Such is the plight of the Division III runner, where there are no scholarships allowed or available. Rather than being given money to run for the college, I worked in the dishroom for several years. That’s the yin and yang of college running at the sub-elite level. You do it for the love of it, and hope you don’t burn out in the process.
One day, as I was finishing lunch and walking out of the cafeteria to go to class, a young woman that I knew from the dishroom was cleaning up the cups and saucers left behind by students. Students were all supposed to take their trays up to the conveyors and send them into the dishroom. Some students seemed to feel that task was beneath them, and left piles of dishes, napkins and leftover food on their tables. The young woman piled some cups on a cafeteria tray and spun to head back to the cafeteria, but she didn’t succeed. I wrote a poem about what happened next.
Waittress Since Thirteen
Although the saucer fit the dish, she turned too quickly, threw the cup, and watched in vain as coffee stained her shoes and left her morning drained, “You’d never know,” she said to me, “I’ve been a waitress since thirteen.
All that Work-Study experience in college saved me from feeling like I needed to flip burgers in some sort of ritualized right-of-passage summer job during school. I certainly had enough of that type of labor for three years at Luther. By the time I was a senior, I got a campus job outside the cafeteria that didn’t require all those early hours. All I can say is that change had a dramatically beneficial effect that I wish I’d figured it out much earlier in college. But that’s life. It’s yin and yang.
The hours spent running with twenty-four guys proved to be great way to get to know people that freshman year in college. While dorm life was a rush of introductions and a socially manic environment by nature, running cross country was like an extended live therapy session. The upperclassmen generally led the way, but as time passed our group of freshman learned to chime in.
One of the chat leaders was a senior, Kirk Neubauer. Possessed of a naturally wry temperament, Kirk would truck along teasing other guys about whatever topic came to mind. Somehow, the topic of summer jobs came up, and Kirk related his summer work as a typewriter repairman. The first time he described the work, we all listened intently, not knowing exactly where he was going with the story. In fascinating detail, he related the order in which the keys needed to be checked or fixed. At least, that’s how I remember it. The funniest part of the day was that Kirk’s Typewriter Repair story lasted almost the entire ten-mile run.
Kirk Neubauer (left) and Walt Maakestad (right)
It’s hard to describe why the story remained fascinating given its seemingly innocuous detail. The way Kirk told the story was the key to its amusing magic. He spoke methodically, with a seriousness of detail that defied its otherwise mundane topic. He spoke as if he was divulging great secrets or actually teaching us how to work on typewriters. Plus Kirk has a natural lilt to his voice that makes just about everything he says a point of amusing fascination. That’s who he is.
The next day, as I recall anyway, someone began the run by repeating the question of what Kirk did for a summer job. In spirited fashion, Kirk responded in deadpan fashion, as if he’d never talked about it before, describing how he’d repaired typewriters for a summer job. Members of the team pitched in and peppered him with questions they could recall from the previous day’s descriptions. And so it went, for another long run, as we all joined in asking about Kirk’s typewriter repair skills.
The Bird Man
As I got to know the guys, I dared to point out some of the birds I saw along the way, because Decorah is a birding hotspot with pileated woodpeckers, wild turkey, bluebirds and yellow-headed blackbirds. There was never that much interest from the group, who considered birds more of a distraction than a point of interest. But one day a tall figure loped up next to me and in a soft voice, inquired, “How do you know so much about birds?”
That big guy was an Alaskan named Walt Maakestad. He stood something like 6’5″ with a full reddish beard and a shake of wild blonde hair atop his head. He proved to be a great influence for me as the weeks went by. Just running next to him made me feel more confident. About running. About life. One day he showed up to model for my freshman art class. He peeled off his shirt and we call did our best to capture the big man in the light of the art studio. I still have that drawing to this day.
My drawing of Walt Maakestad in December of 1975.
Headless Dave Hanson
Dave Hanson (left) racing with Christopher Cudworth in an early season dual meet. I recall that during this meet, I accidentally put a spike through the instep of a competitor’s shoe, stripping it right off his foot. Those are the Tiger spikes I was issued that first season at Luther. I didn’t like them especially.
There was another wry personality on the team by the name of Dave Hanson. He hailed from the small town of Grinnell, Iowa. We both shared a love of writing. His nickname was Headless because in part because he wrote a column for the College Chips called the Headless Norseman. When Dave learned that I could cartoon and write, he invited me to get involved in creating an alternative college newspaper. I don’t remember what he named it, but a crew of us put the paper together with articles, photos and all. The only thing we’d forgotten to do was sell advertising to pay for its publication. The alternative publication never came out, but we had a blast writing the thing. I’d written for the high school newspaper back home, and would later write for the College Chips at Luther, but the notion of developing our own unhindered voice on campus intrigued me to no end. In some ways, that motivation to write in alternative fashion drives me to this day.
The Revolutionary
If I had wanted to follow a true revolutionary, there was one of those on the team as well. He was an Illinois boy like me, hailing from Elk Grove where he was a standout distance runner with two-mile times in the low 9:20s. At Luther, he ran in the wake of Steve Murray and Tim Williamson the year before I arrived, but he was one of the lead guys on the team in 1975.
Damian was an alternative thinker by nature. He was smart, aggressive and open-minded. The 1970s were the perfect storm of opportunities for that kind of person. Damian got interested in the work of a professor named Oliver Cornell that was getting students interested in communism on campus. Those lessons didn’t stick forever, as Damian turned out to be immensely successful in selling Real Estate out west. I do recall coming home from college that year and talking about communism with the father of one of my one of my best friends. His dad was a keen IBM executive and I thought his head was going to explode as I talked about communistic principles.
The closeness of team travels really did mean you got to know guys well, for better or worse. Damian and I got paired as bunkmates on one of our cross country road trips. It turned out he liked to sleep naked, and my shock at bumping into him at night resulted in a yelp and a jump to other side of the bed. The other guys in the room had a laugh about that the next morning. That was just Damian. He was a no-filter kind of guy.
The Long Run
We’d all gotten to know each other pretty well by the time Coach Kent Finanger prescribed a twenty-mile run down to Calmar and back. I’d never done a 20-miler in training, but I did have experience running that long by accident. Back in high school, a group of us sophomore distance runners signed up to run a 30-mile route during a Walkathon out in Dekalb, Illinois. Long Walkathons were popular fundraisers in the early 1970s, replaced these day by road races and other events. Some Dekalb HS runners showed up at the start and we all took off running at a competitive 6:00 pace for the first 10k. Eventually, a bunch of guys dropped out and a few of us were left covering ground in the dead-looking April cornfields in Illinois.
Our plan was not well thought out. As we quickly discovered, none of the aid stations were set up because we reached them long before the volunteers assigned to provide water and other support material showed up. That meant we had nothing to drink or sustain us the entire way. At twenty miles, a few more guys from my team cut back into town, but they were far enough behind me that their voices were lost in the wind. I wound up running all alone with nothing but a hand-drawn map to follow for the last ten miles. For some inane reason, I persisted.
I ran and ran, not knowing the pace or what I hoped to achieve. My legs got sore and tired as hell. At 27 miles, the route finally entered town again and I stopped at someone’s house to ask for something to drink. They were a bunch of college kids. One of them offered me a Coke. I’d been told by my Kaneland cross country coach never to drink Coke during the season, but at that point the thirst within me trumped all other perspectives. I downed the soda and thanked them. Then I continued running. The Coke helped, of course. I arrived back at the NIU fieldhouse exhausted, only to be asked by a few teammates, “Why didn’t you stop?”
It was that experience that convinced me there was nothing special about running exceptionally long distances. That’s why I never focused on marathons during my competitive career. Mostly, I considered them stupid. I still think I’m rather right about that.
A different animal
Perhaps if I’d recalled that adventure I would not have felt trepidation about the 20-miler at Luther that freshman year. We took off south on the shoulder of a state highway and reached Calmar ten miles into the run. I don’t recall getting any water there. We likely just turned around and came back. For all his exercise physiology knowledge, Kent wasn’t one to push us to drink much. He’d have a big cooler and a few cups to share, and that was that. The Old School Way of thinking is that hydration was more of an afterthought than a necessary habit. We never drank water or anything else during any of our ten-milers, and we ran them hard, at 6:00 pace most days.
Fortunately, it was a blessedly cloudy morning that Sunday. A few of the freshman hung in there through 14-15 miles, then dropped out. The van followed us along and I kept going for another mile or two before I was thoroughly bonked. Finally I stopped, climbed into the van and watched the rest of the team heading toward Decorah without me. That left me wondering whether I’d be judged for quitting.
I’d failed the Long Run test but actually didn’t feel too bad about it. Other than the insane 30-mile debacle I’d done in Dekalb that one time, that sixteen-miler was the longest run I’d ever done in my career to that point. It honestly felt great to climb into that van and sit down. There were several of us, including several of the other top-flight freshman with whom I was competing for a Top 7 spot on the squad.
For all the tale-swapping and team building that went into that first few weeks, it was competition that drove us all, all the time. We competed in practice. Competed at the foosball table after dinner. Competed with jokes at the dinner table and even competed for attention with women. Competition was never far from anyone’s mind. Every step, every movement, was about getting better and beating somebody else. That’s the harsh truth of the sport. It’s all about competition.
On equipment day for the cross country season at Luther College, I was handed my first set of Luther Blues for training. I loved the simple dark blue tee shirt with the big number on the front. We got some nylon shorts, and a couple pairs of tube socks. I already had a set of blue Adidas SL-72s to train in. But then I was handed a set of Tiger suede blue spikes, and my heart sort of stopped.
I’d ordered a pair of Adidas blue spikes but either they weren’t in stock or considered too expensive for team issue. The Tiger spikes felt a bit clunky by comparison. I gulped a little, and asked if I these were the right pair. “Yup,” was the response I got. So I moved on.
Such is the nature of the Freshman Blues. So many new experiences that don’t match up with what you’ve done or seen before.
Once our gear was all handed out, we dressed in the pale blue locker room of the Luther field house and gathered upstairs for the first team talk with Coach Kenton Finanger. His stocky build and close-cut hair reminded me more of a football player than a cross country runner. Indeed, I’d learn that he’d been a Little All-American in football and basketball, the other sport he coached at Luther. Forty years later, walking next to Kenton while entering a campus building for the induction of his son Phil into the Athletic Hall of Fame, I noticed him walking with a bent back and a lurch in his stride.
“Well,” I commented cheerily to the man I knew so long. “I guess all our athletic pursuits have a bit of a cost,” and chuckled.
He stopped, looked up at me with that familiar glint in his eye, and said, “I wouldn’t change a thing.”
Kent was an instructor in the Athletic department. His background in exercise physiology and kinesiology came into regular play in his instruction to us about running. The main theme he stressed often was “run from the hips.” He wanted to see that flow in your stride.
His pet word for his runners was “horses.” During one long run that freshman season, our team was cruising on a long downhill toward Decorah when a herd of four actual horses started running alongside us in a field. “Heyyyy….” I can hear Kent calling out the car window. “There’s my horses!” We all laughed.
Beyond all that, Kent was a first rate motivator. His favorite phrase, spoken quite often and scrawled across many mimeographed pages of coaching literature over the years, was “Wow! Fun! Wow!” It sounds cliche, but it wasn’t cheesy coming from the mouth of Kenton Finanger. He was serious about the Wow part because he admired the work done by runners to get fit and compete. He was also serious about the Fun part because he genuinely believed in Fitness for Life.
Kent also was a forward thinker. In 1975, the first two women showed up for cross country at Luther College. Lynne Schmidt and Karen Brandt were issued Luther Blues along with 25 or so men runners. Some of the guys in the program welcomed the girls. Others were not quite convinced. Kent set up training and races for them. Within ten years or so, Luther College women were winning national titles.
Before workouts, we’d gather in a fieldhouse locker room for Kent’s famous pre-workout talks. His rolling conversation style was often filled with anecdotes and stories about other athletes or inspiring examples of achievement. His most pointed language was about learning to believe in yourself.
I wish I’d listened more closely to that lesson at times. When you’re a freshman, and a bit scared by the idea of trying to make the team, all you can think about is keeping up when the running starts. More than once Kent counseled me to believe in myself. He even did it during races. A couple of times, I actually abided in his advice.
A Luther freshman with a big head of 70s hair and a pale wisp of a mustache.
Rich with talent
That freshman year scenario was complicated by the fact that our freshman class was rich with competitive talent. We had five or six guys that had run sub-15:00 for three miles in high school. They included Eric Inbody from Palatine, Illinois, Dani Fjelstad from Albert Lea, Minnesota, Paul Mullen from Rochester, Minnesota, and Keith Ellingson, the hometown boy from Decorah, Iowa.
Keith lived right across the street from Kent Finanger in residential Decorah. There were quite a few Decorah guys in our freshman year class. I was a bit envious of the fact that his friendships carried over into college. He also had a sweet girlfriend named Kristi, also from Decorah, who came by the room to visit occasionally during that first semester. Sometimes she’s bring cookies. And sometimes I’d steal one. Or two.
We needed all the carbs we could get. The training regimen for our team was 70 to 80 miles per week. I’d never run that much in high school. Plus I was still recovering from the massive party my friends and I held when I arrived on the Luther campus that first week.
Nothing could have prepared me for that first day of running with the Luther boys. We took off south toward Pulpit Rock and ran through the campground to the gravel road below Phelps Park. The pace was fast, nearly 6:00 per mile, and the sound of our feet on the gravel road came up like a roar.
We cut through downtown Decorah and ran across a rickety metal bridge. Then we turned right toward Palisades Park. That’s when the college running scenario got Super Real. The road rises at first, then flattens out for a bit. It gains height again and turns abruptly up the side of a bluff overlooking downtown Decorah. I could still the see the front guys up ahead, but just barely through the trees. Around me there was plenty of hard breathing. Much of it was my own. We crested the top of the hill and ran dipping and weaving through the woods road.
Then, without warning, the road dropped back down the hill at a horrific slant. My toes slammed against the front of my running shoes and my knees bore the shock of the descent. Guys cursed. I muttered “Oh crap” and pushed up my glasses as we turned right yet again to fly back down the first hill we’d climbed up. By then, I was so disoriented by that point I had no idea where we were. Nor did I care. One thing ran through my mind.
Keep. Up.
We climbed the steep incline onto Ice Cave road and tore along its gravel as a manic bunch. Finally we arrived back in town and turned onto Leif Erickson drive toward campus. It was warm outside, and cloudy as I recall. I felt turned inside out as cut through campus and ran back down the slope to the fieldhouse. There we stood, trying not to look exhausted. I looked around to see that there weren’t that many guys back yet. I’d done alright. I’d hung in there.
Once the group settled down, a runner named John Mullen, the older brother of my future roommate Paul, pointed at my head and declared, “Look, this guy’s not even sweating!”
He was right. But that was true for all the wrong reasons. I actually think I was still dehydrated from the party effects a few days before. In fact, I was so out of whack I wouldn’t succeed in going to the bathroom that first couple days on campus. My body was rebelling in the vortex of all that hard running. Plus, I was shy as hell about the dorm stalls at first. Credit that to native anxiety. It was a great relief when I finally had to empty my gut after that first couple days of training.
We all adapt in our own ways to change. That’s the nature of the Freshman Blues.
Heading off to college in 1975, one didn’t know much about what lay ahead.
With the summer job completed, and college bearing down on our collection of friends, there was only one thing left to do before starting the next important stage of our lives. Hold a The Big Sendoff Party.
Our clan was a mix of cross country guys with a few other peers thrown in. We gathered at the home of a friend whose parents never seemed to be home. That left the house open for the night. His place sat at the end of a deadend road, so the neighborhood wasn’t dialed into our activities either.
My personal party history wasn’t all that much to brag about, but things were accelerating going into my freshman year in college. Earlier that summer, we made a trip up to Mirror Lake in the Wisconsin Dells. It was supposed to be a fun camping trip, but the Boone’s Farm wine took over early in the evening. There was some prodigious barfing going on with one of our friends late in the night. Come morning, the riverine traces of his misery cut through the sandy soil below his tent. We got up early and decided to go home rather than stay around and try to make something better of the day.
We’d lashed a Sunfish sailboat to the roof of the ’67 Chevy that our friend Rob Walker drove. But given our condition that afternoon and night, we never took the boat near the water. The next morning, in our hungover state, no one thought to check the integrity of the tie job we’d done on the 15-foot boat. Roaring down I-90 back to Illinois, one of the lashings came loose and the boat swung sideways from its streamlined position to catch the full brunt of the wind at 60+ miles an hour. We felt the car lurch to one side and the other. Rob kept it on the road, but we pulled over to tie the boat firmly back in place. Most of us were too stunned to say much. Once it was secured again, we felt safe enough to laugh it off.
Nothing symbolizes the vicissitudes of life more aptly than the effect that sailboat had on our car that day. One minute you’re sailing along, so to speak. The next minute, something in your sphere catches the winds of life the wrong way and it almost drives you off the road.
Often as not, these events are self-inflicted, yet seldom intentional. In running, something as simple as a shoe coming untied can screw up an entire race. So can eating the wrong food before a hard run, or forgetting to hit the bathroom that last time. Among runners, shit really does happen. As in, all the time.
But when you’re a male teenager, the frontal cortex of the brain is not fully developed. That’s the risk-taking segment of the mind. I recently listened to a neurologist on NPR explaining that the decision-making capabilities of teens, especially male teens, is further compromised by the priorities that young men place on peer acceptance over the actual dangers of whatever activities they choose to engage. Young men view losing peer acceptance as a far greater risk than getting into trouble.
That explains why our party at the end of summer got so damned out of hand. We all had a little money from those summer jobs. Some of it found a vodka bottle or two, a ton of beer and perhaps even a little pot to smoke outside. We roiled around the house that night in late summer of 1975 drinking and laughing and wondering what comes next. As midnight neared, someone announced they were hungry for donuts. A few guys piled into one of the cars and off they drove, pretty much drunk as hell, to the Dunkin’ Donuts four miles away.
To their shock and dismay, the store was nearly devoid of donuts at that time. “No fucking donuts?” one of them asked. “This is a donut shop, and you ain’t got no donuts?”
I can’t claim that was a direct quote.The incident was related to me third or fourth hand. I wasn’t there to witness the Drunken Donuts scene, but I got the gist when they returned. Admittedly, I was also disconsolate at the lack of donuts to hand out.
My interests were elsewhere that evening. A former girlfriend showed up at the party and the quiet sparks of a summer night flew between us. We were getting busy beneath the back porch deck when the donut caravan rolled back to the house. The headlights hit us and we quickly separated and zipped up to greet the drunken merrymakers. Never was I so sad to see my friends return.
Things only got uglier and stranger––as Hunter S. Thompson might say––as the evening wore on. Somehow a few of us decided that skinny-dipping in the quarry pond a quarter mile away would be a good idea. We hiked through darkness and stripped off our clothes. The water was black and foreboding, with no moon to light the night. I dipped a toe in the water and recalled, through my own weakly functioning frontal cortex, that quarries often have steep banks. It might be ‘all or nothing’ if one stepped into the water.
In any case, that lake was warmer than the night air and a mist was rising by that time in the morning. I swam in circles without my glasses on. The darkness beneath my chin seemed close as death.I kicked hard to keep my head above water. At that moment I heard raucous giggling by the shore, and looked up to see the shapes of several young women running away with our clothes.
We shouted after them in that muffled voice one uses while trying to be both forceful and secret about it. Then we swam back to shore. Naked in the night, the few of us looked down at our dicks shriveled from the cold and began mincing along the shore to get back to house. The stones hurt our feet. A branch raked across my shoulders, giving me a start. Then we humped our way through a field of wet grass and up the road to the house.
There, standing on the porch where we’d messed around earlier that evening, was the former girlfriend in her tight white jeans and tube top. By contrast, I stood shivering with my hand over my junk and asked, in the most masculine voice I could muster, “Could I have my clothes back, please? I’m cold.”
She chuckled, tossed them in my direction and walked back inside. I never saw her again that evening.
A photo of Christopher Cudworth in the fall of 1975.
Eventually we all did crash on the basement floor. The cold swim sobered me up, so I sat there wondering if I could find that girl somewhere in the house. I didn’t dare go upstairs in case my friend’s parents had gotten home.
It took several days to recover from that party. I went for short runs to work off the fatigue and the stress of staying up all night to drink more booze than I ever did before. Like I said, partying was not my forte, but that night stretched both my expectations and frontal cortex a few notches.
The Big Sendoff signified the dissolution of that group, to some degree. Most of us went off to college. A few stayed and worked local jobs and held the town down while we college boys were gone. That last week of summer I packed up some clothes and ran as much as I could to get ready for the first cross country practice at Luther College.
My parents took me up to school and we walked the Luther campus together with my friend Paul Morlock and his folks. Later that day, I showed up at the fieldhouse to get team-issued tee shirts and shorts, a set of running shoes, and some spikes. I placed them all in a locker and said to myself, “Okay, this is happening.”
A photo of the Cudworth brothers and our father at the Indiana dunes during the mid-1970s. I had on the Sears binoculars we all used to go birding together. Note that my brother Jim is flipping the bird. We were a snarky bunch.
Following high school graduation, the pressure to find a summer job and earn “money for college” entered the picture for the first time. I stumbled around the first few weeks looking for who-knows-what kind of job, then got offered a chance to be an assistant coach for the St. Charles Track Club.
The work paid $500 for six weeks of work. That sounded like a ton of money to me in those days. I’d signed up for Augustana College after visiting the campus earlier that year in track. I ran with the Augie guys who took me for a five-mile run around Rock Island, then did some kind of interval test on the track facing the railroad tracks and highway to the north. No one went easy on me. It felt like a test of some sort.
My father was the one that drove me out to the Quad Cities. He waited in the car while all this was going on. During the visit I met Coach Paul Olson. I remember liking the guy, and we had a little talk. A few weeks later I received a letter of acceptance from Augustana, but the letter said, “You will be on academic probation the first term…” I didn’t like the sound of that.
So I sat on the letter knowing I’d at least gotten into college somewhere. We also visited Illinois Wesleyan that year, whose square-ended indoor track did not seem so great. So for the time being, it was Augie for me.
Summer track world
Not knowing how else to approach the big changes to come, I retreated back into the cozy and familiar world of coaching summer track. There were great boy and girl athletes in the club, including Mark Claypool, the Kaneland runner who won national AAU titles. I once did a workout with him in which he gave me 25 meter head starts while he ran 200 meter repeats. He still ran me down. Later in his career, he pumped out a 46.8 400 meters or somesuch fast time for the University of Illinois.
The littlest athletes were great fun to coach as well. We had a team of nearly 100 kids, traveling around to meets in Moline, Bloomington-Normal, Sterling, Belvidere and other cities. I was secretly smitten with a few of the female athletes my age, but knew that my role as a coach was to stay objective and help them any way I could. Still, it was summer, and the short shorts of that era didn’t make it easy to hold back the hormones coursing through my veins.
It helped that the head coach by then was Carol Rosene. She had taken over the club from Trent Richards, my high school cross country and track coach, and threw her heart and soul into the program. Her husband Bob Rosene was a blind runner of some renown. His dog ran with him in many events.
Coach or athlete?
Participating in a rare summer race on the black cinder track at St. Charles High School.
Sometimes I’d choose to race in those summer meets, but I was never fit enough to make much impact. I recall running a 4:40 mile in the blazing heat on that wide-open track at Belvedere. When I got done, I swore never to race the rest of the summer. I don’t think I did. But my rival from Burlington Central, John Rath, kept on racing and getting better. He was a quick little bugger in the mile. His times dropped into the low 4:20’s as the summer went on. As I recall, he advanced to nationals and did quite well. I secretly hated him for that.
Meanwhile a coach from that part of the county named Mr. Riley came down to help out the program. He mainly coached the girls in many events, especially the high jump, where athletes like Andra Olson and the irrepressible Kelly Murphy won meets on a regular basis. We also had a spunky young athlete from a gymnastics background who jumped 5’8″. She’d run up to the bar and you’d think “that’s too high for her” but she’d bend like a licorice stick and come down in that shredded foam pit with another successful attempt. Our equipment wasn’t always the best, but we made it work.
The other guy that helped coach summer track was my close friend Rob Walker. We’d shared our high school junior and senior year together, and he would go on to a career in sports facilities management. But we coached girls basketball together during the winter of our senior year. I learned much from his measured approach and commitment to the kids. His little brothers ran for the St. Charles Track Club and Rob was an exceptional influence on kids of all ages.
Rob Walker running cross country for St. Charles High School.
Inner-city days
We also traveled to Chicago to run in inner city meets that were all-day affairs where the summer sun burned so deep into your brain you’d feel like a creature from another planet by the end of the day. I recall admiring the sweat-soaked foreheads of the black head coaches running those inner city teams. Some of them were former Olympians giving their time to coach kids.The weren’t all the picture of fitness, yet they seemed indefatigable, guiding those kids in sprint heats all day long. Their dedication and stamina was tremendous.Meanwhile, I’d be hiding in the shade whenever I could.
Our band of mostly blonde-headed little white kids ran around like little wisps of suburban fury and the entire Chicago track scene had a carnival feel. Years later, as a father, I took my extremely blonde-headed, six-year-old daughter to a track meet where she ran a series of races and sat down amongst a crowd of same-aged black girls talking and chatting the day away. She was fascinated with their social dynamics, listening intently to their conversations and laughter. My daughter was no slow-poke, but she’d run enough races to surmise, in her own six-year-old mind, what she thought about the day. “Daddy,” she turned to me and said, with positive and open honesty. “Black girls are faster than white girls.” In that moment, I didn’t disagree.
Formative times
My path would continue following a close friend Paul Morlock, at left in the diamond tie, at Luther College.
Coaching kids that summer between my senior year in high school and freshman year in college was indeed a formative experience. As mid-July approached, the pending need to prepare for college arrived. I learned that my close friend and high school teammate Paul Morlock had committed to attend Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. “You should check it out,” he told me. “It’s really beautiful up there.”
For reasons that only my father understood at the time, he agreed that it would be a good idea to visit Luther. We piled into our giant white Buick LeSabre and drove the back roads through southwestern Wisconsin to arrive in Decorah late on a summer July morning. The sun was shining brightly, and the quaint downtown looked like a picture postcard.
Pulpit Rock south of the Luther Campus.
We sat down for lunch before driving up to campus. The hippy-style restaurant we chose had open seating. I noticed a set of Luther athletes sitting next to us. “Hi there,” I told them. “I’m visiting Luther. I’m a runner.”
The guys laughed some, then one of them pointed at a blonde and lean figure at the far side of their table. “So is he,” they informed me. Indeed. It turned out to be John Jorgenson, a recent All-American in the 440. We talked a bit and he encouraged me to sign on. “You don’t want to go to Augustana,” he contended. “You’ll like it here better.”
The Luther cross country coach Kent Finanger was not in town that day, so I didn’t have a chance to meet him in person. But my father was so impressed with the look and feel of Luther, he worked to convince me that it would be a great place to be. “You could cook a wild game dinner in the dorm,” he enthused, looking around at the hills and wild areas surrounding Decorah. “Your birdwatching would be great!”
A week later, I received a letter of acceptance for Luther, along with a financial aid package that was a bit better than what Augustana offered. Best of all, there would be no academic probation for me. The letter stated: “Based on your involvement in extracurricular activities, we think you’ll do fine as a student here at Luther College.”
SOLD.
We sent a letter of declination to Augustana that day. They actually refunded my $100 application fee. I was admittedly no great loss to their academic prowess. My C+ grade point average was not anything to brag about. But Luther wanted me, with no strings attached. So from that point on, I was a Luther College Norseman, whatever that would come to mean.
A few days later, we received a letter stating that my first college roommate would be a Decorah native by the name of Keith Ellingson. He was also a cross country runner, the letter said. My mother insisted that I should call him and ask if he’d like to purchase matching bed covers. After I talked with him a few minutes, I brought up that subject and Keith was like, “Sure, whatever.” I hung up aghast that my mother suggested such weirdness. But sure enough, our bedcovers matched the day we both showed up for campus and that first cross country practice in August of 1975. Little did we know how many ways our lives would match in the future.
When indoor track rolled around in the winter of 1974, our track team moved over to an elementary building called Davis School five blocks from the high school. There we engaged in an intense series of proprioceptive exercises under the guidance of our coach Trent Richards. We hopped and bounded, did strength workouts and generally built up our bodies for distance training. In some ways, those workouts were a throwback to gym tactics of 40 years before. In other ways, they were filled with foresight, as Trent was progressive in his knowledge and interest in sports physiology.
Years later through Trent I met the world’s best middle distance runner at the time, Sebastian Coe. He was trained by his father Peter Coe, and articles about their approach emphasized how much preparatory training they did before starting the running portion of his program. Sure enough, Coe did many of the exercises Trent had us doing that winter of 1974.
We were relieved that winter that our training involved less running in the hallways of St. Charles (Thompson) High School. During January, we’d do interval workouts on those tile floors and it was dangerous as heck. We’d start upstairs at the south end of the building, tear down the dusty hallways to the stairs at the far end of the building, run down at full tilt, then sprint back to finish as the base of the stairs at the south end of the building. It was insane and exhausting work. We did it because there was no indoor track available to us.
That meant it was treat to run on actual indoor tracks when the season started. I recall feeling free and strong that winter thanks to our bounding workouts. That first indoor race at the West Aurora track I ran a 4:35 mile, at that point the fieldhouse record.
When outdoor season came around during my senior year, I tried my best to help the team win meets every week. Typically that would involve running the two-mile to start the meet. Then I’d go high jump and triple jump. I set a school record at 40’4″ in the triple jump. I high jumped six feet. At the end of the meet I ran the mile. On a couple occasions, I won all four events.
My drawing of Trent Richards measuring the high jump at a meet. He stood 5’7″ and one jumped over 6’5″.
That schedule was fun, in its way. It made me feel important, which for a kid in perpetual need of affirmation and self-esteem, worked wonders.
In truth, it wasn’t helping me become a better runner. Lacking the focus on how to actually improve my mile and two-mile times, such as breaking the races down into splits to hit, I kept running the same times week after week. For example, I ran a 4:29 mile six weeks in a row. Nothing worse. Nothing better. At the county meet, I took the field out in 2:10 at the half, hoping to improve my time. The pack came by me at the 3/4 mark to finish in 4:24. I ran 4:29. Again. I ran the same exact time at the district meet in an attempt to go downstate. The state qualifying standard was 4:29, which I equalled, but finished seventh, one place out of qualifying. My best two-mile time wound up 9:58. I ran faster than that at the two-mile mark of dozens of cross country meets. I had a mental block.
Getting through high school is always a transition of one kind or another.
Missing state again hurt quite a bit. It doubly hurt because the Kaneland track team for whom I would have competed had we not moved to St. Charles won the Illinois Class A state meet that year. My former classmates Ron Ackerman, Jim Bishop, Larry Will, Mark Claypool and others all won individual state titles or made All-state. They were a dominating bunch, that Kaneland team. They even won the mile relay too. How such a small school developed such a collective of top-level talent is a credit to its coach Bruce Peterson. He was a hard man, but his athletes did great things. To this day I wonder if I’d have run faster in track as a Kaneland Knight than I did as a St. Charles Saint. I would not have needed to do all that high jumping or triple-jumping, because there were athletes far better than I competing in those events. Maybe I’d still have tried. It’s a fault of mine.
Watching the Kaneland team crush it at Eastern Illinois made me jealous, I’ll admit. My friends and I got sunburned in the May heat and piled into our cars to drive home. On the way, I noticed a carload of former Kaneland classmates driving back the same road. The car filled with girls I knew, and we laughed and waved. Then someone started flashing us, and the fun began.
Fruit baskets
So many body parts were pressed against car windows that day it defies description. Breasts and balls, butts and wankers. We laughed so hard it was difficult to keep the car on the road. The girls were great sports about it. They definitely got as much laughter out of the situation as we did. Suns out, buns out. We were all just kids having fun with body parts.
Along the way, we must have stopped to get food, or else I somehow followed up with one of the girls to get her phone number. I set up a date for the following weekend. We met up to go to a movie. I chose a brash bit of comedy called Shampoo, starring Warren Beatty. It was all about sex.
I’ll describe my date not from my own perspective, but through the words of one of the other women in the car that day, who turned out to be a lifelong friend of mine. She collected my artwork, and I patronized her flower shop. Every Christmas, I’d buy “Flowers for a Year” for my wife. Each month I’d pick out flower arrangements with that friend and we’d catch up and tell stories. She had the same birthday as my wife, and they were similarly built. Funny thing is, I knew what her breasts looked like because I’d seen them plastered against the car window years before. She knew a few things about me too. Such are the sweet contradictions of high school antics and lifelong friendships.
Anyway, I finally confessed to that lifelong woman friend that I’d gone out with a girl that was also in the car that day. “Well,” she said quietly. “That must have been nice. She’s the prettiest woman I’ve ever known.”
She was, that. So while I never made it downstate in track, there was sweet consolation in securing that date for some parking time out in the cornfields. I learned that young women sometimes wander outside their social circles for adventure in life.
High school was over then. We all graduated and got spit out the other side of scholastic life. The next steps were ours to choose. It was time to run head-on into life.
After eighteen meets during the regular season in 1974, it was time to run in Districts, the first toward going downstate. In my case, that race would bring me full circle to the Kaneland High School cross country course at Elburn Forest Preserve.
I knew the course well after four years of racing out there for Kaneland and St. Charles. It felt like my home course even though I was two years removed from running for the host school. The start faced south toward the railroad tracks, and getting good position at the first turn toward the woods meant going out strong.
The starting line of the District meet 1974. My former Coach Rich Born is behind the bunch at far left.
My record of the race that day, in which I finished fourth behind Ken Englert of Elgin, Rick Hodapp of Naperville Central and Jeff McCoy of Lake Park, is captured in both “official” and “unofficial” photos. A St. Charles photographer took great photos during the race. My father Stew also moved around the course capturing the event on his trusty Polaroid.
The problem with Polaroids is that they were susceptible to double imagery on occasion. This photo shows a Central runner, I think it was Randy Russell, along with my teammate Paul Morlock, #379. The runners in the middle are Jeff McCoy and John Rath.
After taking the hill at Elburn, the two two top guys Ken Englert and Rick Hodapp were battling together at the 1.5 mark.
This is the exact same spot as the photo above. My dad knew a good photo op at that course.
You can see that Englert and Hodapp were flying down that straight for the second loop on the course. These two guys had many great races against each other, having just fought it out at the Upstate Eight Conference meet the week before. But Englert pulled away in the middle mile, as evidenced by the picture of him taking the lead along the east woods. This section of preserve is now covered over with dense undergrowth.
You can see Hodapp turning the corner behind Ken Englert
I was not far behind these two guys fighting it out for one of the coveted top five spots that would move on to Sectionals.
Racing at the 1.5 mark.
At some point, Jeff McCoy slipped past me into third. I held fourth through the last mile and had to sprint like made to keep John Rath at bay in the last 100 meters. You can see in my face how much it hurt those last few yards. But I beat Rath, a keen rival all season. He’d go on to beat me by 30 seconds at Sectionals the following week. The guy did know how to rise to an occasion.
My father took photos of the top finishers receiving their awards.
Districts winner Ken EnglertRick Hodapp in his funky capMy fourth place award. My father must have missed third, or the photo didn’t come out. John Rath. Goofy hats were “in” back then.
It was a nice accomplishment to advance out of Districts against that level of competition. The Sectional meet was held a week later. I arrived nervous and a bit overwhelmed at facing the level of competition in the sectional featuring York High School, the perennial state championship team famous for The Long Green Line. To make matters worse for my anxious state of mind, my starting stall was right next to the York team. Despite my general love of competition, I was intimidated. The guy next to me was also Dave Finnestad, a former rival from the Little Seven Conference and a rising star in Illinois running. He’d finish a few seconds behind me that day. Neither of us ran up to full potential.
My nerves got the best of me. The gun went off and I developed a side stitch in the first mile. Anxiety sometimes caught up to me in high-level competition. I willed myself to a 15:51 three-mile and finished in the Top 25. But it was disappointing. That was not good enough to advance in a sectional where the top individuals compete for select spots outside the team competition. The battle between Rick Hodapp and Ken Englert flipped again as Rick outran Ken by four seconds at Sectionals. The York sectional was one of the toughest in the state, with several Chicago-area sectionals typically dominating the top ten positions in state cross country. The Sectional Wall had held against me.
My father captured a photo of York’s Ron Craker leading the race.
Ron Craker finished second in the Section to his teammate yet went on to win the state individual title that year.
The season’s end came with a combination of disappointment and relief. I definitely wanted to go downstate, but the pressures of trying to win against the top guys from every team each week added up to a state of mental fatigue by that first week of November. My mother’s illness scared me that fall, and the rapid succession of meets combined with schoolwork and social life made me tired in the head. Then my girlfriend decided to break up with me. She’d fallen for some surly dude that I instantly hated because he looked like a no-good character. So I was depressed.
I weakly went out for basketball and learned quickly that I was not going to play that year. I felt anger and relief at that too.
Free Time
That meant there was free time after school. A band of us cross country guys started playing pickup football on the grassy area where our home course chute was typically placed. We were joined by a girl or two, including a super-cute cross country cheerleader named Mary Ellen Pooley, who was also a good athlete. She made touch football a joyous bit of laughter and beauty. After four solid years of sports dedication in cross country, basketball, and track, it felt good to let down for a bit and just be a high school kid.
One of our Campus Life counselors heard about our football games and showed up to ask if we’d like to join him in playing in a flag football tournament in Wheaton. We put together a bunch of guys and showed up for the tourney not knowing what to expect. I played quarterback because I had a great arm and accuracy. My cross country teammate Rob Walker played running back and our big Campus Life counselor Gary provided the bulk of the blocking, pun intended. He’d played in high school and was tough to get around. It was fun competition.
The tourney lasted all day.We kept winning games. The longer we played, the more that our cross country conditioning came into play. I’d done a fair amount of scoring, and during the final game the score was close and I wanted the ball. But my best friend Rob wanted the ball even more. “Cuddy,” he told me. Trust me. I can run it in…” Rob said. He was actually the faster runner and I did trust him. He would have been a great soccer player if we’d had the sport in the day. I handed the ball off and he faked an inside run, the tore down the sideline for a winning touchdown. I can still see that image of him with legs flying and guys diving after him. What a run!
After the tournament, tired as we were, we all went to the movies to watch the flick The Longest Yard. I remember there were some disgustingly sweet donuts involved in our celebration, and fizzy Cokes. Through all my years of organized sports and official teams, there was still something quite satisfying about that ad hoc flag football victory. We finished the day in fading light and light rain that November afternoon. We were soaked through with mud and thoroughly tired and satisfied. That tournament experience put a cap on my freshman fantasies of going out for football years before at Kaneland High School.
I kind of laughed at the thought that all that cross country running had gone to good use in a football game.
We Run and Ride 