During three glorious months in Florida last winter, Trudy and Cole Johansen put 463 miles on their bikes and then 1,008 miles more over the summer when they returned home to Cedar Rapids.

Their final ride in August, right before Cole's surgery for lung cancer, was on their favorite wooded trail south of town to Ely.

“It's very hard for me to believe that I will never get to ride bikes with him again,” Trudy wrote to friends two weeks ago. “Our 1,000 miles last August will be our last.”

On Jan. 13, as the couple prepared to pack bags for their fourth trip to Florida, doctors told them that the cancer had not been stopped as first thought but instead had spread throughout his body.

The 67-year-old former teacher and golf and assistant boys basketball coach at Jefferson High School, who retired in 2007, survived three seemingly unrelated cancer attacks over his life.

The first was in 1969, a year after he finished a basketball career at Iowa State, when it was diagnosed in his nasal canal while in the Army.

Then, in 2005, cancer was discovered in his salivary glands. And a year after that he developed thyroid cancer.

This time, however, there is to be no cure. No treatment that will do much good. Essentially, no hope.

“I still pray every day for a miracle,” wrote Trudy, a retired Spanish teacher at Washington. “We do not really know how much time. They said weeks, months. But it's spread in so many areas, and it's unlikely to slow down.”

The one blessing, she says, is that her husband so far has no pain.

Nor was there indication that anything was wrong with him at all when he went for his routine annual check-up at the Veterans Administration hospital in Iowa City last summer.

A non-smoker and a lifelong physical fitness advocate, he was given a chest x-ray as standard procedure because of his history of cancer.

Still, the August surgery to remove part of one lung was felt to be successful and there was no evidence of cancer in a follow-up exam last October.

In between those two months, he'd spent all but 10 days in the hospital, first with double pneumonia and then with a blood disorder.

He appeared to recover from both setbacks, however, other than a low white blood cell count.

“Cole was doing great,” says Trudy. “We were ready to head to Florida.”

Then came the death sentence.

“They said chemotherapy wouldn't do any good,” she says. “And it wouldn't improve his quality of life.”

He's home now under hospice care, losing his strength day by day. He has difficulty speaking and is unable to swallow solid food.

“The body gets weaker,” says his wife. “But his mind and his heart are as strong as ever.”

Last week, his childhood buddy from Woodstock, Ill., came for a visit and the two old pals recalled the days when the 6-foot-5 stringbean went by the nickname of “Sky” and set the school record for career points.

He was also named to the all-metro team by the Chicago Tribune.

On a full-ride scholarship to Iowa State, he was the steady sixth man on a mid-60s team with All-American Don Smith that played a game in 1967 at UCLA against Coach John Wooden and the iconic Lou Alcindor.

“They clobbered us by 35 or so,” Johansen recalls. “But at least I can say I was on the same court as Lou Alcindor.”

With his master's degree from Iowa State, he started his teaching career at Lake Park in northwest Iowa and coached girls six-on-six basketball.

He later taught at Parkersburg, where the late Ed Thomas was the beloved and legendary longtime football coach.

Johansen was first a counselor and then a history and business teacher at Jefferson for 20 years.

The head golf coach the whole time, he remembers excusing current NASCAR driver Landon Cassill from practice so he could race at Hawkeye Downs.

As an assistant coach, he helped take five teams to the state basketball tournament under coaches Bob Landis and Stu Ordman.

Johansen also holds the distinction of having a perfect record as a varsity head coach.

Landis tells of the time in 1991 he was ejected from a game in Iowa City – “bad decision by the officials,” he jokes – and was automatically suspended from the next game against Prairie.

With the head man listening on the car radio in the parking lot, Cole took over and the J-Hawks won.

Former Jeff star Lucas Ptacek recalls a similar scenario two decades ago when Ordman had to sit out a game with Xavier.

“I remember it was senior night,” explains Ptacek, now the associate principal at Iowa City's Northwest Junior High. “We started something like 20-2 and won the game. So, as far as I know, he was undefeated as a head coach.”

Landis, now living in Florida and long-since retired after an illustrious coaching career, defines his good friend Johansen as a “great coach.”

“Cole loved the young people he worked with, and they knew it,” he says. “And Cole was kind, a quality missing in the lives of many.”

Others echo the sentiment.

Out of thousands of games on the bench, the one Johansen relives the most is the heart-breaking 1992 state quarterfinal when eighth-seeded Jefferson lost 65-62 in overtime to top-ranked Clinton on a full-court buzzer beater shot.

“Even as an adult, I don't refer to him as anything other than Coach,” says team member Tory Meiborg, a J-Hawk first-team all-stater and now president of World Trend Financial in Cedar Rapids.

“All the guys had tons of respect for him. I can tell you that over the years he helped steer an awful lot of kids on the right track.

“We all liked him. And he had expectations for us that we wanted to live up to.”

Ptacek was both one of Johansen's business students and players, and later a basketball assistant coach with him at Jefferson.

“I learned so much from him,” says Ptacek. “You won't find a more caring, compassionate man.

“He's always been someone I could go to for advice. He keeps things in perspective. Always calm, always under control.”

Even now as his health rapidly declines.

“Cole doesn't have a cranky bone in his body,” says Trudy. “He's always positive. It's just that we thought we'd have much more of our life together.”

Both previously divorced and with grown children – his sons Jay, 44, and Derek, 41, and her son Colin Harms, 27 – they began dating in 2003 and were married three years later by their pastor from First Lutheran Church in the backyard of their home near Washington High School.

“We've had so much fun,” Trudy says. “We only wish we would have gotten together sooner.”

They share, of course, a lifelong love for education.

And as a memorial to Cole, a charitable foundation has been established to fund an annual college scholarship for a senior Jefferson basketball player who exemplifies  Johansen's dedication to teamwork and academics.

Then, too, is his passion for sports and healthy living.

A portion of any donated funds will be used to place a bench in his honor and plant trees around it along the nature trail the couple so often pedaled side-by-side.

Trudy says the special spot has already been approved, near a pond not far from Wright Brothers Boulevard, where her husband took his last ride last summer.

“I've enjoyed everything I've ever done,” Johansen sums up, slowly but surely. “I wouldn't change a thing too much.”