Rio Rancho's Hannah Kiess left track behind. Four years later, she's running at the NCAA Championships

In October 2023, Hanna Kiess was plenty busy. Then a junior at New Mexico, she was working toward a bachelor’s degree in finance. Active as a member of Kappa Delta Chi. Volunteering regularly. “All kinds of stuff,” she said last week.

But something was missing. One day, she sat down and wrote a block text of an email, sending it without quite knowing what would happen next.

Hi, my name is Hannah Kiess and I am a third-year student at New Mexico … I am interested in walking on …

Kyra Mohns read it. As the sprints coach for UNM track and field, she liked what she saw from Kiess’ past: a three-time state champion sprinter and hurdler at Cleveland High School, Kiess was actually courted by UNM and a handful of other schools as a prep athlete.

The present was a little trickier. Sorority life is “very hard to balance with athletics,” Mohns said. Kiess hadn’t trained intensively in two years, so jumping back in would be a challenge. And she looked small — if there was a body type Mohns looked for, Kiess wasn’t exactly it.

But head coach Darren Gauson told Mohns to invite Kiess in, see what she could do. Besides, UNM needed to balance its Title IX numbers.

“She was like, ‘alright, you start Monday,’” Kiess remembered. “And now I’m here.”

Less than two years after writing that email, Kiess has rewritten part of UNM’s record books. In just her second season with the program, the Rio Rancho native broke a 41-year-old program record in the 400-meter hurdles, clocking a 57.70 on May 31 — 0.19 seconds faster than the previous program best.

On Thursday, Kiess ran the second leg of UNM’s record-breaking 4x400-meter relay at the NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships in Eugene, Oregon. Ahead of the race, Kiess admitted the weight of the moment hasn’t quite hit her.

“It just feels a little, like, not real,” she said.

Why couldn’t it have happened earlier?

“I might have been, I don’t know,” Kiess admitted, “a little burnt out.”

When Kiess was in the eighth grade, she helped Cleveland win a state championship in the 4x400 and finished fifth in the 300-meter hurdles. That kick-started a five-year stretch where she finished top five at the 5A state meet in at least one event, ending her prep career with a pair of state titles in the 100-meter and 300-meter hurdles as a senior.

But the times didn’t tell the whole story. When Kiess talked to herself before races, she’d hear a message of pressure, reminding herself that if she lost, she’d be letting everybody down.

“I wasn’t really having fun,” she said. “Because I was so anxious about what could have happened, and like, ‘oh, I need to win, I need to do all this.’

“And I just didn’t want to really experience that anymore.”

So, with offers to run in college, Kiess instead enrolled at UNM as a regular student, free from training and racing and the pressure that came with it. For two years, she lived away from the pressure that sucked the joy out of running, finding new sources of happiness around her.

But she missed being part of a team. With some encouragement from her mother, the email was written and sent.

Mohns responded a day later.

Are you available Monday?

“I was like, yep, indeed I am,” Kiess laughed.

Starting over again with track had its own pitfalls, though. Not only was she trying to catch up physically, Kiess initially ran in the clutches of imposter syndrome: “Like, ‘OK, I have no right to be here with all those people,’” she laughed. “‘I have no idea what I’m doing here.’”

But things started to shift. Slowly. In her first year with the program, Kiess worked her way from a 1:03.25 to a 1:01.75 in the outdoor 400-meter hurdles “with like six months of training,” Mohns said. “That was pretty impressive to me.”

When Kiess came back the next season, she ran a 59.50 to kick off the season — a new personal record by more than two seconds. Mohns remembers her elation, the joy Kiess showed at the finish.

She also remembered the realization after: “She was like, ‘oh my god, I just ran so fast — how am I going to do that again?’” Mohns said. “I think as she’s progressed through the year, she’s coming into her own realizing, like, ‘I deserve to be here. I work hard.’”

Kiess has recorded a new personal best in the outdoor 400-meter hurdles in seven of eight races, an astonishing clip for any runner — much less one in their second year of college track. The only race in which she didn’t set a record was in a prelim, but she locked up a spot in the final where she then broke the school record.

How? Where her self-talk before races used to be negative, Kiess now finds herself thinking only about leaving it all on the track. There’s nothing to lose, everything to be won.

“Like, ‘I’m just some walk-on — like, I’m just lucky to be here. I get to train, so life is good,’” Kiess said.

Even if the results aren’t quite befitting. For instance, Mohns believes there’s plenty more Kiess can do if she starts running cleaner races.

“If we can get to have a race rhythm, like, she can run 56 (seconds) easily,” she said. “She can make a national meet … if she’s healthy and she continues to train really hard next year, the sky’s really the limit for her.”

All it took was two years off.

“I was able to step back, like, ‘OK, this is something I really want to do, and I cannot take anything for granted,’” Kiess said. “ … I was so lucky, again, to just be able to come here at this time. I think everything kind of lined up perfectly.”