Comets hold final pasta dinner of the season

By John Burbridge

sports@charlescitypress.com

CHARLES CITY — Pasta.

It’s what’s for dinner, especially if you’re a long-distance runner fueling up the night before race.

“It’s what they call ‘carbo loading’,” Dean Stewart said. “Runners have been doing that for a while.”

And hosting pasta dinners for the Charles City boys cross country team is what Dean and his wife Sara have been doing for nearly eight years.

“It rotates from family to family,” Sara said. “This is about the second time we’ve hosted one this year. Or is it the third?”

The Comet tradition of team pasta dinners before every meet — big or small — has been going on long before the Stewarts became semi-regular hosts when their son Nick starting running for the Comets.

Nick graduated from CCHS in 2014, and younger brother Adam is due to graduate this spring.

“So this might be our last pasta gathering here,” Sara said the night before last Thursday’s Class 3A state qualifying meet in Decorah.

“Though, who knows, we might still be asked to host one even after Adam graduates,” Sara said.

Really, there’s nothing unique going on here. There are probably enough cross country teams across the country holding pre-meet pasta feasts to keep parmesan cheese stock shares from ever experiencing market famine.

But there is a secret recipe to the pasta dinners the Stewarts hold.

“It’s her apple crisps,” Comet cross country runner Chris Campbell said of Sara’s version. “We make a joke that her apple crisps make us run faster.”

“It’s just another one of our traditions,” junior Luke Delap said. “We have them at every one of our dinners.”

“You do?” asked Sara, who may have had her recipe stolen … or replicated.

“I think Adam brought them from your house,” Delap said, perhaps preventing an apple crisp war among the team’s families.

In the past, only Charles City’s boys varsity runners took part in the pasta dinners.

“But this was a small team numbers wise, so for this year they decided to include the junior varsity runners,” Sara said. “I think it’s better that way.

“Only tonight, since only varsity runners are still running this season, we have a smaller group here.”

There was slight chance there would be at least one more pasta team gathering had the Comets boys advanced to the state meet as a team. Though for the 12th time in 13 years, Charles City’s boys team will have a representative at Saturday’s meet in Fort Dodge in junior Gavin Connell, who qualified as an individual for the third straight season.

By way of winning the Class 3A state qualifier, the Comet girls squad advanced as a team.