By Sean Conboy (HS'08)

Even before her first stride, even before she approaches the start line, even before the gun crackles and the synapses in her brain send a signal to her thigh and her toes, even before she rockets off the block, hurdler Jackie Guevel is in her rhythm. She repeats the cadence in her head like a battle hymn.

1 step, 2 step, 3 step ... snap.

She has to, because hurdling isn’t a schoolyard race. It’s not just you-versus-me. It’s also me-versus-me. Its soundtrack isn’t the booming thunderclap of stampeding horses. There’s a rumble, sure, but in between, there’s silence—the half-second when Guevel hears nothing but the wind—the moment when she can’t move her legs faster or pump her arms harder, when she can do nothing but float.

In the silence, it can all go terribly wrong.

There is a razor-thin line, about half a centimeter, which separates an efficient hurdle from disaster. If Guevel snaps her leg down a millisecond too soon, she’ll face-plant. If she lets fear in for a moment—if she thinks about the first time she snapped too soon, the first time she felt the world turn on its axis, the first time she ate rubber—she will fulfill those very prophecies.

As the freshman civil engineering major floats through the air in the NCAA Division III championships at Ohio Wesleyan University, Tartan friends and teammates scattered around the country on summer break are huddled around laptops watching a live stream of the event. They know what she can do; she’s already been named the UAA Women’s Rookie of the Year for outdoor track and field and the Mideast Region Women’s Track Athlete of the Year. Can she be an All-American, too?

1 step, 2 step, 3 step … snap.

Growing up in Dallas, Texas, she danced through the air first as a ballerina, then on a whim decided to try hurdling in middle school. But Guevel was unconventionally tall, and her long legs didn’t always cooperate. At first, she gracefully jetéd over the hurdles like she was still on pointe. One day at practice, she wiped out and got a nasty scar across her hip. That’s when the revelation came. That’s when she went into attack mode and started running at the hurdles. She found her rhythm, her battle cry. “In ballet, you count the music by eights,” Guevel explains. “In the 100-meter hurdles, you count by fours.”

1 step, 2 step, 3 step … snap.

In Ohio, the Texan ballerina’s Asics running shoes are pounding the red rubber of the track like a war drum. She conquers the 100-meter hurdles in 15.19 seconds (against strong winds) and the 400-meter hurdles in 1 minute, 1.82 seconds, finishing seventh in both events. Across the country, friends bob up and down in delirium, knowing that the top eight finishers are declared All-Americans. Guevel joins Carolyn Lowe (S’92) as just the second female athlete in university history to become an All-American twice in the same meet.