Tavaris Chillis and Trevor George went on a cross-country training run Wednesday morning on an unusual course: every street of the Minnesota State Fair.

Their “water stops” during the 5-mile run included: Big Fat Bacon, Churros & Aguas Fresca, and Libby’s Ice Cream.

“There’s water in grease, right?” joked Coach David Terry, the brainchild behind the Great Minnesota Get to Run Together. “I mean, Greece the country.”

RELATED: Dave Terry’s Top 10 Minnesota State Fair food commandments (plus one)

Chillis, 16, a rising junior at North St. Paul High School, and George, 14, a rising freshman, were joined on the run by Charlie Taube, 19, a cross-country runner who graduated from North St. Paul in June. Terry and Taube did the State Fair run last year, and Terry hopes it will become an annual tradition.

The boys were through the gates and running by 8:15 a.m. “You’ve got to get here early,” Terry said. “It gets too congested otherwise.”

They ran to Judson Avenue, on the south side of the Fairgrounds, to start the route, and then ran every east-west street as they headed north.

Big Fat Bacon on Nelson Street was Stop No. 1. Workers at the booth, who knew the boys were coming by, held out maple-glazed bacon on a stick to each runner like they were handing out water cups at a race.

“It’s the best bacon I’ve ever had. Low-key, it is,” Chillis said. “It’s got syrup on it.”

The next stop was for strawberry-filled churros at Churros & Aguas Fresca (Lee & Underwood). The boys used their Blue Ribbon Bargain Books to get $3 off one filled churro (regularly $6).

“I always recommend getting the Bargain Book. Absolutely,” Terry said. “It’s the Best Bargain book since Bargain Books were invented. There are some really good deals in there. Some of my favorite items are actually in the book. My favorite beverage is in the Bargain Book: honey lemonade.”

Coach Dave Terry and his runners, from left, Trevor George, Terry, Tavaris Chillis and Charlie Taube, toast the end of their run at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds with honey lemonade. (Mars King / Pioneer Press)

The churros got a thumbs-up from George. “It’s really good,” he said. “I like the filling.”

“Yeah, he’s even feeding us our fruits,” Taube said. “There’s strawberry filling in these.”

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After running all the east-west streets, the boys began working their way through the north-south streets of the Fairgrounds.

The third stop was Libby’s Soft-Serve Ice Cream on the east side of Cosgrove Street outside the Education Building. Out came the Blue Ribbon Bargain Books for $2.25 off a waffle cone (regularly $7).

Total mileage by that point was about 4.1 miles at an 11:38 pace, which Chillis dutifully entered into his Strava running app under “Minnesota State Fair run.”

The final stop was at the Agriculture Horticulture building for a glass of honey lemonade, which added another half-mile to the run. That turned out to be Chillis’s favorite item of the day. “That was unmatched. I’m not gonna lie,” he said.

Inspired by late coach — and the Fair

Terry, 57, of Stillwater, has been coaching runners for 35 years. He is the distance coach for the North High School boys and girls track team and was the boys’ cross-country coach at the school prior to the team’s merger with Tartan High School in Oakdale a few years ago. He now serves as the volunteer summer conditioning coach for the North members of the team.

Having his team members come to the Fair is the perfect opportunity to meld his two passions, he said. Alumni helped fund the trip.

“It’s the perfect way to burn off calories at the same time you’re taking them in,” Terry said. “My advice is to try everything. You don’t go to the Fair to count your calories. That’d be very depressing.”

Terry, who goes to the State Fair all 12 days, loves its “sense of community,” he said.

John Class, longtime owner of Libby’s Soft Serve, hands off a cone to North High graduate Charlie Taube during the last food stop of his Minnesota State Fair run. (Mars King / Pioneer Press)

“You can talk to strangers, and it’s not strange. People are strolling. There is no hurrying. Very few people are on their cellphones. They don’t complain about the lines. They don’t complain about the high prices. You know, they’re willing to pay a little more. It really is kind of a break from the real world is what it is, you know? It’s just wonderful. It is the Great Minnesota Get-Together.”

Terry, a 1986 graduate of North High School and the 1985 St. Paul Suburban cross-country champion, said he came up with the idea for running every street at the State Fair as a way to honor his high-school running coach and mentor, John King, who died in 2020 at the age of 88 from complications related to COVID-19. King made the news after he ran every street in St. Paul in 1976 and ran every street in Minneapolis in 1984, he said.

“After he passed away, I thought, ‘Well, how can I pay homage to him and his achievement?’ So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll put my two passions together, and we’ll run every street of the State Fair,” Terry said. “People cheer and clap. One of the vendors waved us over and gave us free water. That was really nice.”

Cross-country advocate

Running in the morning is key, Terry said, because the streets aren’t crowded, the food lines aren’t long, and it’s generally cooler. They run on the Wednesday of the Fair because that is generally one of the slowest days, he said. The boys wear their matching team T-shirts that say “United We Run” on the front and “Finish The Race” on the back.

Wednesday’s run — complete with stops — took about 90 minutes. “We really take our time,” Terry said. “We’re not breaking a sweat. We just kind of take it all in.”

Terry is a passionate advocate for cross-country running for young athletes. “There’s just no downside to joining cross-country,” he said. “I mean, you make friends. It’s a great community. It’s a healthy community. Whether you want to run for fun, or you want to run to get in shape, you’re always going to improve. You’re really racing against yourself.”

Terry, who grew up in North St. Paul, said he went to the State Fair a few times as a child, but his real State Fair obsession started in 2003.

“At first, I wasn’t a big fan,” he said. “I went a couple of times, but then a friend invited me. He talked me into going back, and I had the Australian battered potatoes, and I just wanted more of it. I would go once and then it would be a bummer because it was over, and I’d have to wait a year. Then I’m like, ‘Wait a minute. I can go twice.’ Eventually, once you get to six or seven or eight, you think, ‘Well, I might as well just call it 12 times, you know?’ I get my calorie intake for the whole year, and then I burn it off the rest of it.”

Again next year?

After the run, the boys headed out for strawberry lemonade, black cherry soda and cheese curds.

“Oh my God, I’m so full,” Chillis said as they started to head to the exit. “I had bacon, a strawberry-filled churro, and what else? Double-chocolate ice cream. Honey lemonade. Strawberry lemonade.”

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Chillis said he was glad Terry got them up and out early.

“It was cool watching how it gradually and gradually got more and more people pulling up,” he said. “Coach Dave literally kept emphasizing, we’ve got to get there before everybody else. When he kept emphasizing that, I wasn’t really taking into consideration how much people are gonna start showing up so quickly.”

Terry declared his second-annual cross-country training run a success, saying he would be “hard-pressed to find any other fairgoers who enjoyed the day as much as those boys did.” He hopes word of the fun event will help recruit other runners.

“Next year, I hope we have even more come out,” he said. “Before you know it, it’ll be our 10th year. It’s funny how time flies.”

Dave Terry, the distance coach for the North High School boys and girls track teams, goes to the State Fair all 12 days every year.

The past couple of years he has led a street-by-street run through the Fairgrounds with carefully curated food stops along the way.

He has 10 — make that 11 — foods he won’t leave the Minnesota State Fair without eating.

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“I’m so confident with my selections that they’re not really suggestions, they are commands: ‘You have to have this. You have to try this,’” he said. “It’s got to be done, you see? It’s my Top 10 Food Commandments.”

Big Fat Bacon on a Stick: It’s big, it’s fat, and it’s bacon. I always get that. That’s like a daily vitamin.

Libby’s Soft Serve Ice Cream: Best soft-serve cone I’ve ever had in my life.

Funnel Cakes’ Funnel Cake with strawberry topping: It’s reasonably priced, and it’s served fresh. It’s got a nice crunch to it, and it’s not too sweet because, well, I’ll tell you a little trick, okay? They put the strawberries in the middle, but you can always take one of those plastic forks or knives and spread it around, so it’s not quite as sweet.

Minnesota Honey Producers Association’s Honey Lemonade: It is the most refreshing beverage I have. I refer to it as a healthy electricity. It’s sweet and sour together. It’s just a perfect infusion of both.

Cranston’s Scotch Egg on a Stick: It’s a great way to start off the day. It’s a large egg wrapped in sausage and deep fried. It’s a good breakfast food on a stick. The guy’s name is Joe. He makes his own homemade horseradish sauce. It’s not overpowering. It’s creamy. I still think about the time I dropped half of one. What a waste that was. The ants had a field day, though.

The Strawberry Patch’s Strawberry Shortcake: It’s just kind of melt in your mouth savory. It’s moist, drenched with syrup, along with strawberries and whipped cream. The biscuit isn’t dry, which I thought it would be the first time I had it.

The Pork Chop on a Stick at Peterson’s Pork Chops at the 2025 Minnesota State Fair. (Jess Fleming / Pioneer Press)

Peterson’s Pork Chop on a Stick: I’ve never had a bad one. It’s charred to perfection. And when it is charred a little bit, don’t let that scare you. You have to have the seasoning with it. It’s free. It’s in a shaker.

Ragin’ Cajun’s Jambalaya: It’s in the Beer Garden. This is a new one for me. It’s, like, at the top of my list. It comes in a small bowl, but there’s so much flavor, and it’s just enough. It really is. I was really impressed. I could have that on a daily basis.

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Mancini’s Porketta Pork Wings: They’re reasonably priced. I’ve just never had ribs quite like that before. Most people haven’t. I guess a rib shank, and it’s got a seasoning on it, and it just falls right off the bone. It’s really good. You get the whole thing.

Corn Roast’s Roasted Corn on the Cob: It’s roasted corn, so it does have a different flavor to it. I avoided it at first because I thought, ‘Well, it’s corn, right? What’s the big deal?’ But the first time I had it, I remember it was charred, and I thought it was burnt, so I turned it in for another one. The lady working the stand said, ‘Well, those are the best ones,’ and she was right! So now I wait to get the most charred one. They put butter on it, and then you can season it with salt and black pepper.

The Sandwich Shop’s Monte Cristo: I had to add this one. Once you take a bite, you’ll know. The only deep fried sandwich at the fair. Choose the raspberry sauce. It’s a winner.

By GEOFF MULVIHILL, Associated Press

President Donald Trump’s administration this week told 40 states to eliminate parts of lessons that focus on LGBTQ+ issues from federally funded sexual education materials or that they will lose funding.

The move is the latest in a line of efforts since Trump returned to the White House in January to recognize people as only male or female and to eliminate what he calls “gender ideology.”

“Federal funds will not be used to poison the minds of the next generation or advance dangerous ideological agendas,” Acting Assistant Health and Human Service Secretary Andrew Gradison said in a statement.

That position contradicts what the American Medical Association and other mainstream medical groups say: that extensive scientific research suggests sex and gender are better understood as a spectrum than as an either-or definition.

The funds in question in the Personal Responsibility Education Program total over $81 million for the 40 states plus the District of Columbia and five territories where officials were also sent the letter. The officials were told they have 60 days to change the lessons or could lose their grants.

California was warned previously, and the $12 million grant for that state was stripped on Aug. 21.

Now, other states will have until late October to decide whether to comply or give up the funding.

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong also suggested there could be legal challenges to the administration’s effort. “Threatening to defund our schools over this is completely unhinged and we’re not going to let Trump steal money from our kids,” he said in a statement.

The grants are used to teach adolescents about abstinence and contraception. They target education for those who are homeless, in foster care, living in rural areas or places with high teen birth rates — and minority groups, including LGBTQ+ populations.

Alison Macklin, spokesperson for SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change, said the grant money is used for things like training sex education instructors and for groups that present lessons in schools or after-school groups.

“This money is essential to states and territories to support sex education,” she said. “They build critical life skills for young people.”

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She noted that some states have laws requiring education about lesbian, gay and transgender people.

In the letters, the federal Administration for Children and Families pointed to specific examples in textbooks and curricula that they find objectionable.

For instance, a curriculum used in Alabama encourages the instructor to ask participants to share the pronouns they use.

It also tells the instructor to tell the class that people “may identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or straight. Some may identify as male, female or transgender. All of these differences make us unique. Regardless of how you see yourself, your background, previous relationships or experience, each of you has a place in this group.”

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster applauded the warnings during a question-and-answer period with reporters this week.

“The things they describe there really have got no business being in there,” he said. “Somebody has gone crazy somewhere trying to put all this stuff” in lessons.

Associated Press reporters Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina, and Susan Haigh in Hartford, Connecticut, contributed to this article.

The Adams administration wants to expand the Health Department’s capacity to inspect cooling towers atop buildings after an outbreak in Harlem—stemming from bacteria found in towers at two city-run properties—killed seven people.

A woman holds up a city flier notifying Harlem residents about the Legionnaires’ Disease outbreak in their neighborhoods. (William Alatriste/NYC Council Media Unit)

Mayor Eric Adams wants to expand the city’s capacity to inspect buildings for Legionnaires’ disease, and strengthen penalties for property owners who fail to comply with cooling tower regulations, after an outbreak in Harlem killed seven people this summer and sickened more than a hundred others.

The Health Department on Friday said it had concluded its investigation into the cluster of Harlem cases, which officials said stemmed from cooling towers contaminated with Legionella bacteria at two city-run properties in the neighborhood (as the Daily News first reported): Harlem Hospital at 506 Lenox Ave., and a nearby construction site overseen by the NYC Economic Development Corporation at 40 West 137th St. Both sites have since been cleaned and remediated, officials said.

“We must ensure that we learn from this and implement new steps to improve our detection and response to future clusters,” Adams said in a statement Friday, calling the outbreak “an unfortunate tragedy.”

Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, among the candidates running against Adams in November’s general election for mayor, has called for an independent probe of the incident, saying it “raises troubling questions about whether City agencies complied with their own inspection and enforcement standards.”

Legionnaires’ disease is a type of pneumonia caused by the bacteria Legionella, which can grow in stagnant water and sicken people who breathe contaminated water vapors (it cannot spread from person to person).

New York City building owners are currently required to register their properties’ cooling towers and monitor their water quality three times a week, according to the Health Department, which called the city’s regulations “among the most rigorous and protective laws” in the country.

But Health Department inspections of cooling towers dropped to a near-record low in the months before the Harlem outbreak, which the agency blamed on staff shortages, according to reporting by the news site Gothamist.

Mayor Adams on Friday proposed several measures to strengthen the city’s testing and enforcement mechanisms, including expanding the number of inspectors, requiring building owners to test for Legionella every 30 days during cooling tower operating periods instead of the current 90 days, and increasing fines for related violations.

Here’s what else happened this week—

ICYMI, from City Limits:

Struggling to pay rent, or facing eviction from your apartment? City Limits spoke to experts about what tenants can do if they’ve fallen behind on their payments.

More migrant youth—many of whom are or were recently living in city shelters—are seeking guidance on how to navigate their immigration hearings as the Trump administration continues to pursue courthouse arrests.

Both the city and federal governments want to make it easier to involuntarily hospitalize people experiencing homelessness and mental health issues, but such policies “just push suffering out of view—until it resurfaces again, often worse,” writes op-ed author Josiah Haken, CEO of the homeless outreach group City Relief.

ICYMI, from other local newsrooms:

About 3,100 families who get CityFHEPS housing vouchers will soon have to pay a higher portion of their income on rent, one of several reforms the city is making to rein in spending on the assistance program, The City reports.

The Trump administration is moving ahead with the redevelopment of Penn Station, but no longer plans to tear down an entire Midtown block as part of the process, according to Gothamist.

The City Council is demanding the NYPD stop surveilling public housing campuses via Big Apple Connect, the mayor’s free internet program, according to New York Focus. The newsroom’s reporting previously revealed how police have used the initiative to tap into video cameras at NYCHA buildings.

To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org. Want to republish this story? Find City Limits’ reprint policy here.

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