Robert Gary Quotations

I am especially pleased with the women and their great run today. That was a great start for them. The men ran well and got some good training work in.

It has been a goal of our program to recruit the best distance runners in Ohio. The past two seasons we have qualified for the NCAA championships with a roster made up of Ohio only athletes. I feel we got the best this year and am very excited to add him to a very young team.

It has been a very exciting first year really working with the women's program. I have been impressed with their competitiveness and their adaptation to the training. They are rounding into shape just as we enter the championship season and I am excited to watch the program make a huge jump like the men's team did my first couple years coaching.

There are two stories to the origin. The first one involves a bunch of guys who got together for a horse race in England during the 1800s. The weather was bad and they did not want to risk hurting their expensive horses, so they ran the race themselves. The second was a (horse) race where there was so much fog no one could see. They ran from church steeple to church steeple in each town. Supposedly that's how it got its name. Either way, the event came from people running from town-to-town and jumping over fences, creeks and whatever else was in the way.

There is a level of expectation here when it comes to the steeple. It's not much different than Ohio State football. We expect to be one of the top programs in the country each season.

It's been incredible the last couple of weeks. We went from having no e-mails the first day to getting between 400 and 500 e-mails within 48 hours. I was literally getting two or three e-mails a second at one point.

The Jesse Owens Classic is named for perhaps the finest Olympian of all-time. Matched with the great facility we have at Ohio State, the (Jesse Owens) Classic has been and will be one of the premier events in the country for years to come. Incorporating the high school events has helped the Classic reach top competition at several levels.