Kiwi mum's brave battle - FROM TERMINAL CANCER TO POWERLIFTER!

How a South Auckland survivor beat the odds to tackle one of the world’s toughest sports

- Rebecca Barry Hill

Powerlifter Angela Wilkinson clearly remembers the moment Karen Daniels came to her for training late last year. The pair knew each another through the gym where Angela was a personal trainer and Karen was into bodybuilding, but Angela hadn’t seen her for years.

“She was wearing a beanie when she arrived and she struggled to walk,” recalls Angela. “She was tired. She’d put on weight and had burn marks on her arms. She was shy – not the Karen I knew. She was totally different and there was a darkness there.”

Little did Angela know that the mum-of-two had been battling stage-four breast cancer and a year of gruelling chemo had taken its toll – those marks on her arms were a side effect.

But Karen, from South Auckland, was determined to get her life back, enlisting Angela to help her start the long, slow process of getting her match-fit for competitions. “I wanted to prove to myself that there was life after treatment – that I can be strong,” Karen, 47, explains to Woman’s Day.

Today, you wouldn’t know she was the same person. Still beaming from completing her first powerlifting competition as part of Valkyrie, New Zealand’s only all-women powerlifting team, Karen’s in an empowering new phase of her life.

Not only is she back training at the gym, feeling stronger and more energetic by the day, but she also has a newfound determination to have a crack at all her big goals. “I’m really excited,” she says. “I wasn’t able to do any lifting last year, so this is a big step for me.”