The Katie Oppo Memorial 5K Run/Walk returns to Manhasset on June 14 at 9 a.m., drawing several hundred participants to Flower Hill Village Park in Nassau County for a race that has outlasted grief and turned it into research money.
Elizabeth Oppo has organized the event for more than 15 years. She has lived in Manhasset for nearly 30 years, leads the Katie Oppo Research Fund, and has watched the annual fundraiser grow from a tight circle of her daughter’s college friends into a multigenerational community gathering that draws strollers, competitive runners, and leashed dogs in roughly that order of arrival.
The race works in waves. Timed runners go first. Walkers follow. Then come the families with strollers and the dogs, which is either chaos or community depending on your disposition. The effect is deliberately inclusive, and it works.
Katie Oppo was 18 and a pre-med student when doctors diagnosed her with small cell carcinoma of the ovary, hypercalcemic type, known in research literature as SCCOHT. It is rare, aggressive, and carries a grim prognosis. She sought out information, connected with other patients, and didn’t stop moving toward a goal of beating the disease and helping those who came after her. She didn’t make it. The fund her mother built in her name has, according to Long Island Press, raised over a million dollars across 15 years, supporting clinical trials, research partnerships, and a global tumor registry specifically focused on SCCOHT.
That money matters more than the round number suggests. The U.S. spends hundreds of millions annually on ovarian cancer research in the aggregate, but the slice reaching SCCOHT research lands in the low single-digit millions each year, most of it driven by individual researchers winning competitive grants rather than any coordinated national budget. A community 5K on Long Island is, in that context, a real funding mechanism, not a feel-good gesture dressed up in race bibs.
“We consider it a memorial run,” Oppo said. “It’s a legacy for our family to fight, to battle ovarian cancer.”
Elizabeth Oppo is direct about what watching her daughter shaped in her. Katie remained focused and forward-looking through a diagnosis that would have broken most adults twice her age, let alone an 18-year-old who had just started college. Her mother watched that.
“She was a very strong person and very courageous,” Oppo said. “She did not give up hope, not until the very last.”
That observation didn’t stay private. It became the engine behind everything that followed.
“When I saw how she handled her disease, it made me a stronger, better person,” Oppo said. “I had to live up to the legacy of her strength and her courage.”
The early editions of the run drew most of their crowd from Katie’s own peer group, friends who came back from their respective colleges to support her and then stayed involved after she died. Those friends are adults now with their own families, many no longer living in Manhasset. The crowd has shifted.
Oppo has noticed. She doesn’t treat the change as loss.
“I love that the crowd is getting younger,” she said. “We’re still attracting young people.”
That continuity is what separates a memorial event from a memorial. One is a gathering that happens once, solemn and fixed to a single moment. The other is a living institution that keeps recruiting. The Katie Oppo Memorial 5K is the second kind, which is harder to build and harder to sustain. Organizations like the Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance and the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition track the broader funding landscape that community efforts like this one work alongside, and the gap in dedicated SCCOHT resources makes locally driven fundraising unusually consequential.
Fifteen years is a long time to keep showing up. Most grief eventually finds a quiet equilibrium. Elizabeth Oppo has kept hers pointed in a specific direction, toward a disease that most people hadn’t heard of before it took her daughter, toward a global registry that documents cases researchers would otherwise never connect, toward a park in Manhasset on a June morning where strangers show up wearing racing bibs because a young woman from Nassau County decided she wanted to beat her cancer and give back, and her mother decided to carry that intention forward after her daughter no longer could.
Registration for the June 14 race is open through the Katie Oppo Research Fund.