GUILDERLAND — It wasn’t until Zeynep Rice was 51 that she began competing in taekwondo. The Guilderland woman won a gold medal in individual forms at the state championship in March and placed 15th at the national championship in July.

Zeynep Rice of Guilderland had earned a black belt at age 37 but had never competed.

“I never wanted to compete,” she said. “Now that I’m older, I think I don’t want to miss any opportunities that present themselves,” said Rice, a native of Turkey. “Now that I’ve passed 50,” she added, “I think I need to try the opportunities to measure against others, before life takes my physical capacities away.”

Rice is married to Robert Rice, master instructor of Guilderland Martial Arts, the taekwondo school that the couple owns together. Their three grown sons also have black belts.

Her response to an empty nest

Rice began to immerse herself in training after her youngest son graduated from Guilderland High School in 2017. She started training as soon as he left home, she said.

“I was shocked at how I felt about being an empty nest,” she said, explaining, “I felt like, ‘What is my position in life?’”

For the last year, she has trained twice a day, six days a week. When she was not training, she was practicing in her kitchen, while watching YouTube videos in an effort to memorize the many forms she might need to know for competition.

A form is a set pattern of defense-and-attack motions, such as stances, blocks, punches, strikes, and kicks.

She had trained over the years while raising her children, but never that intensively.

This spring she began to compete.

“In our age group in New York State, there’s nobody competing,” she said. “I don’t know why.”

She got a gold medal in individual Poomsae (forms) in her age group at the New York State Taekwondo Championship in Queens in March. There was only one other woman in her age group, she said. The state championship was a qualifier for nationals, she said.

In the pair forms — with its slow and dancelike synchronized moves — at the state championship, there was no one else competing in the Rices’ age group, and the couple took gold.

“Not many people can continue at our age,” she said.

The national competition, though, is different. There, the Rices said, people were competing in their categories, and many of them were world champions, who had represented the United States in international competition.

Zeynep Rice placed 15th in individual forms in her age group in July at the 2018 USA Taekwondo National Championships in Salt Lake City, Utah.

At nationals, she and Robert Rice came in seventh in pair forms. The age category for pairs is much broader, at 31 and over, than it is for individual competition, where they compete in the 51-to-60 age category. So, in pairs, the couple was sometimes competing with people 20 years younger, they said.

Their son Mete (pronounced “May-tay”) was the only one in the family to earn a national medal, winning silver in board-breaking.

Zeynep Rice also competed in board-breaking at nationals and was encouraged by her technical scores, she said.

“I never thought I’d be competing,” she said. “It was really nice to put my feet back in the training, and try the competition, after 50. That was always Rob’s world, and the kids’.”

Taekwondo, she said, “offers a path to competing at a national level, in a serious sport.”

Zeynep Rice has always liked to move and be active. “I like to move my body, keep my body feeling alive,” she said.

She has long been a runner and has continued to run throughout most of the past year, although not since she started to prepare for competition and needed to concentrate on taekwondo. “I’ll get back into it,” she said.

She has skied all her life. The capital city of Ankara in Turkey, where she grew up, has a “nice mountain” beside it named Elmadağ, she says, that was “like Jiminy Peak or something, but without snowmaking.”

A 40-minute drive away, it was visible from the city. “You could see if there was snow, and go,” she said.

Cross-border family  

The Rices met in the first weeks of graduate school at Pace University, where they were both studying computer science, in the late 1980s, when computers were becoming popular. They each graduated in a year and a half, and got married.

She had come to the United States with her family, after her father, who worked for IBM, got a job transfer to this country.

“We stayed here, and my parents left,” she said. “It was a little bit sad for them. They never meant to leave me here.”

“Understandable,” her husband interjected. “You bring your daughter on an IBM assignment, and then she stays there!”

Initially, her parents were hesitant, she said. “They were worried that I would be left behind in a culture I didn’t know.”

Her parents’ fears aside, Turkey is a second home for the entire Rice family. All of them have not just visited, but lived there.

The couple spent the first decade of their marriage moving back and forth between Turkey and the U.S., trying to find the best combination of jobs for both of them and childcare.

Their first and third sons were born in Turkey, and their second son in the U.S.

In Turkey, Zeynep Rice says, they had the luxury of having her mother and grandmother to help raise the three children.

All of the Rice children have Turkish middle names, and their youngest son, Anthony Mete Rice, goes by his Turkish name.

All three boys speak enough Turkish that they can have conversations when they go to Turkey for extended vacations, she said, or when family comes to visit.

All three sons have a copy of the cookbook she made a few years ago, using a telephone app, at the request of one of her older children, featuring the family’s favorite dishes, “the way we made things, not like from a cookbook,” she said.

“I worked hard on it,” she says, of making each dish — many of them Turkish — taking photographs, and writing out the steps so the boys could recreate the family’s food in their own homes. It also includes dessert recipes from her family and Robert Rice’s family.

The Rices moved back to America for the final time, in 2000, so that he could take a job helping a friend who had opened a taekwondo school in Westchester — he would be running its after-school program.

Her grandmother was so sad when they left, she said. “I still can’t forget how much she cried. She had had so much valuable influence on each of my children.”

Undaunted by the long flight, her grandmother did come to the United States to visit, in 2006, when she was in her late eighties.

It was in Westchester that Zeynep Rice started learning taekwondo and went all the way to the level of black belt. She earned her black belt in 2004, while raising her children.

The Rices moved to the Capital District in 2005. Both work for the Guilderland School District, she as central registrar, and he as a math teacher at the high school. They opened Guilderland Martial Arts in 2007.

Learning to teach

“Zeynep helps with all the classes,” Robert Rice said, adding that part of the responsibility of those who have higher belts is to help other people be successful.

She doesn’t have her own class that she teaches yet, she said.

“But that’s coming,” Robert Rice said. “It can’t come soon enough for me.”

She wants to be more confident about teaching first, she said. She looks forward to having her own class when she’s ready.

“I am very particular about certain things,” she said. “I want to have a clear plan. I don’t want to wing anything.”

Zeynep Rice doesn’t feel uncomfortable about having her husband as her teacher, she said.

She sees him totally differently when he’s at the school. “When he’s my teacher, I just look at him as my teacher,” she said. Robert rice, with a sixth-degree black belt and many years of experience as an instructor, has knowledge that she would also like to have.  

The desire to know more is key, she said. “There’s no way, if you’re not interested, you’re going to learn all these forms.”

Somehow, she said, “This magic thing has happened in my head, and I’m like, ‘I’ve got to know everything!’”