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But shuffling along with her distinctive style - arms pumping furiously, running shoes barely rising off the track, face set in a look that suggests a serious student on SAT day - Rhines usually is able to maneuver in and out of the track traffic like a Vespa weaving through SUVs.
She's moved in and out of Olympic running events just as easily.
The dainty 1996 Villanova graduate has made three American Olympic teams in three events - from 5,000 meters to the marathon distance of 26.2 miles - moving up and down the distance ladder.
Rhines' 2008 Olympic experience will begin tomorrow night, when the U.S. long shot runs in one of three qualifying heats for Friday's 5,000-meter final.
She won three consecutive NCAA outdoor titles at 5,000 meters while at Villanova. Four years after graduating with a degree in civil engineering, she competed in the 10,000 at Sydney.
When she didn't qualify for the final there, the then-26-year-old native of Liverpool, N.Y., grew restless.
"When I was young, I always dreamed about finishing in the top 10 in the Olympics," she said this week during a conversation in the athletes' village. "But after Sydney, I realized that if I was going to do that, I probably had to move up to the marathon."
But that didn't work, either. In Athens, she fell ill with the flu and finished in 2 hours, 43 minutes, 52 seconds, which left her in 34th place.
Rhines' husband and coach is former Villanova runner Terrence Mahon. They lived and trained in Ardmore until 2005, when Mahon got a job as a coach at the Team Running USA training facility in Mammoth Lakes, Calif., a place designed to produce more and better American distance runners.
She arrived in Beijing on Aug. 3 and until a few days ago, when she moved into the athletes' village, she'd been training at the U.S. team's Beijing Normal School facility.
She's been running 40 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes in the evening, unaffected, she said, by the city's smog. Every other day, Rhines has been working on her speed, doing several repetitions at 300 and 1,000 meters.
"I still enjoy it," said Rhines of running at 34. "My times are getting better. And I'm doing something I love."
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