Power up
Karen Humphreys threw herself into fitness as she grieved the loss of her son, never imagining she’d one day set a world record by squatting almost double her body weight.
words DEBBIE GRIFFITHS | photos KATIE COX
Did you just say you picked up a washing machine?”
“A front loader, yeah,” laughs the 159cm-tall grandmother, suddenly realising how far from normal that sounds.
She explains that you can ‘flick it onto your legs’ to carry it up steps. Same with a small chest freezer; although when helping a friend move house recently, her coach Mike Jones had already called to insist that she refrain from lifting whiteware. It was, after all, the lead up to defending her world powerlifting title.
“At the last worlds, three lifters were injured in the week before,” she laughs. “As we get older, we’re just not as robust as we used to be.”
It’s the only concession to her 61 years that she’ll make.
“I see other people doing what I’m doing and the fact that they’re 40 years younger doesn’t mean anything to me,” she says. “At my daughter’s wedding in Fiji, I wore a dress with shoestring straps. Some young guys wanted to know ‘how’d you get traps like that?’. That felt good.”
Fighting spirit Karen grew up in ‘middle of nowhere’ Kaihere, aiming for a career as an architect. Back then, technical drawing was only for boys.
“My parents had to go in fighting for me. The school eventually said yes, and I thought ‘right, I want to show these guys’, so each year, I was top of the class.”
Years later, she fought for her own teenager when he fell ill. After three weeks of night sweats and debilitating aching limbs, came the nightmare diagnosis.
“I didn’t even know what leukemia was,” she admits. “Jono looked it up on his computer and said, ‘Mum, I have cancer’. I was dumbfounded.”
Seventeen-year-olds are usually treated at Starship but, because Jono had left home and was working, he was treated as an adult so Karen was told she couldn’t stay with him. Her tenacity kicked in.
“I stood my ground and wouldn’t leave. I think I got guts and determination from my parents.”
In August 2013, Jono lost his battle with cancer. Channelling the grief By the age of 50, she’d taken up boxing, but after being deemed too old to compete, Karen switched to powerlifting, entering her first competition just six months later.
“I started like anyone else; lifting tiny weights around a tenth of what I lift now,” she says.
Since then, she’s won multiple national titles, the Commonwealth Championships in 2022 and last year, the World Champs in Mongolia. In October, she attempted to defend her title at the IPF World Masters Powerlifting Champs and the Commonwealth Powerlifting Champs in South Africa. Karen’s deadlifting weight was five kilos off the 155kg to secure the overall win but her best squat of 120.5kg set a new world record.
Ruthless Barbell Club owner Mike Jones says it’s rare to meet someone as dedicated. “To push our top competitor, a highly accomplished athlete, to their limit made for an exciting and rewarding day on the platform.” Strong focus “I close my eyes, blank everyone out and go through all the motions in my mind; going to the bar, doing the lift, racking it up – and then I go and do it. Visualisation is so powerful.”
Karen’s target weights are already scrawled on sticky notes in her car and on her work desk for future international competitions. She’s even eyeing up the next age category that she’ll move into when she’s 69.
“There’s a new set of records to break,” she smiles.
