This 43-year-old mom of 4 kicked her way to 6 medals at the World Taekwando Championships

Besides being a mom and wife, Sara Keener's next favorite thing is taekwondo.

So you can imagine how the 43-year-old Polk woman felt after she seriously hurt her knee in a tournament.

"I had surgery last September so I took lots of weeks off," she said. "I had 75% of my meniscus removed and I thought, 'I'm never going to do taekwondo again.'

"But thankfully, that was not the case," she added with a smile as she talked about the six medals she won recently at the World Taekwondo Championships in Amsterdam.

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Almost since she began training in the Korean martial arts in 2015, Keener has had the goal of competing in the World Taekwondo Championships.

Because only black belts can participate at that level, she couldn't go to England when it was there six years ago, or to Argentina three years ago when she wasn't yet to black-belt status.

"I've always wanted to go to Europe, so I was super excited to compete in Amsterdam," said Keener, whose only other international trips were while she was attending Ashland University — to Taiwan to teach English for a summer and to Haiti for a mission trip.

And compete she did, winning an individual gold medal in the patterns category and a silver medal in sparring in the women's second-degree black belt senior division. Anyone 36 and older is in the senior division.

She also competed on the medal-winning U.S. women's team in patterns and won medals in sparring and the other two categories in the tournament — specialty breaking and power breaking — even though she didn't participate in those three categories. Teams were not broken down by age, so some members on the U.S. squad were as young as 18, said Keener, who noted she was the oldest.

"Those women are amazing, just phenomenal competitors," Keener said about her teammates. "There's a lot of talent there, so it was a real honor to be on the team."

She injured her knee trying specialty breaking, so decided not to do that or power breaking in Amsterdam. Breaking boards or other objects is a must for every degree of black belt testing. Once you break something it becomes addicting, Keener said, though it's typically not part of her tournament routine.

"Even my instructor was like, 'You never do specialty breaking, why did you try that?' " Keener said.

In addition to overcoming her knee injury, Keener had to earn a spot in the World Taekwondo Championships, which took place July 29-31. That involved the U.S. team coaches, one of which was her instructor, evaluating potential members for a couple of years and attending two workouts during a two-year period. She did one of her workouts in Ohio in Sylvania and the other in Fairbanks, Alaska, where her instructor teaches and where she started learning under him.

Sara Keener started taekwondo in 2015 in Fairbanks, Alaska

When her family moved to Alaska in 2014, Keener said, they were looking for an activity for her son, Jack, who was 7 years old at the time, and decided on taekwondo.

After a year of the instructor trying to talk her into joining her son as other parents had done with their children, Keener finally did. She hasn't looked back.

Even when the family moved back to the Ashland area in 2019 and the closest schools for her type of taekwondo were in Sylvania and St. Clairsville, that hasn't stopped Keener, who works out in her basement, usually at night after her children have gone to bed. As a stay-at-home mom, Keener has home-schooled her four children.

For taekwondo, Keener said, there's the World Taekwondo Federation and the International Taekwondo Federation, which she trains under and has a lot of subsets — her subset being a small one. Because of that, her instructor encourages her to start a school in the Ashland area.

"I have thought about it, but the timing has not been right," Keener said. "The reason I would open a school is it would be easier for my own training. If it was my job, I would be more prone to continue and you learn better when you're teaching."

Motivating yourself to train can be challenging, but she makes it work, Keener said. Sometimes her 15-year-old daughter, Elly, who also is a second-degree black belt, trains with her, though she is more into softball now.

Her son made it to first-degree black belt, and now focuses on football. They both attend Mapleton High School with her oldest child, Hope, 17, who supports her mom's passion but doesn't participate herself. Youngest child, Nora, 12, is a blue belt.

While her husband, Ryan, did karate many years ago, he hasn't gotten into taekwondo, though he, too, supports his wife. He owns a home renovation business, which, because she isn't handy, Sara Keener isn't involved with unless he needs a board broken, she said with a laugh.

Keener graduated from Hoover High School in North Canton, where she still has family

She met her husband, who graduated from Ashland High School, while she was attending AU. They were engaged in the early 2000s when they and two of their friends decided to move to Alaska.

They returned to the Ashland area to get married, loved Alaska enough to start raising their family there but then wanted to move back near extended family. Keener graduated from Hoover High School in North Canton, where she still has family.

Wherever the next World Taekwondo Championships are in three years, Keener said, she hopes her husband and children can come. She went by herself to Amsterdam, which she got to tour for a few days after the tournament.

She admits it won't be easy to keep training mostly by herself for the next three years, but looks forward to it because of her love of taekwondo.

"There's always something to train for," she said. "I can test for third-degree black belt in February and there's a tournament in March in Houston, the North American Championships, so now I can't stop.

"And I didn't get the gold medal in individual in sparring, so that's my goal," she added. "Next Worlds I will be third-degree and it will be tougher, so I will have to step up my game."

This article originally appeared on Ashland Times Gazette: Ashland-area woman shines at World Taekwondo Championships