Detective Senior Constable Kaylene O’Kane from the State Flying Squad will be running the New York Marathon this year!
Detective Senior Constable O’Kane will be running for the Ovarian Cancer Research Foundation and for her Aunt Tania, who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2018 and is a huge inspiration and a constant source of unrelenting encouragement for her niece.
In Australia, one woman dies every eight hours from ovarian cancer and the five year survival rate is just 49 percent.
Five years later, Tania is still fighting.
Detective Senior Constable O’Kane’s journey to the New York Marathon has not been an easy one.
After her aunt’s diagnosis, she had herself tested for the BRCA1 gene mutation – a mutation that means cancer is much more likely to develop, and was told she does carry the gene mutation.
As a result, she underwent a prophylactic double mastectomy in 2019.
Detective Senior Constable O’Kane is typically humble when she talks about the surgery and said it knocked her around a fair bit.
Always fit, healthy and active, she found the convalescence required for healing difficult.
In late 2020, after she had recovered, Detective Senior Constable O’Kane got back into running.
She started squeezing runs in before and after her shifts.
In 2022, she joined the State Flying Squad, which is regularly deployed throughout Queensland. Here, she would explore the city or town she was deployed in through a long run.
Detective Senior Constable O’Kane has always wanted to run the New York City Marathon and last year, she made the decision she was going to go for it!
Having had only run a half-marathon and a few 10km runs (these sound difficult enough), her Uncle Kevin put together a training regimen, which meant four exhausting runs a week and waking up early on a Sunday and running another 30km!
Rain or shine, heat or chill, in whatever town or city she found herself in, working around shift work, she kept to her training schedule.
Detective Senior Constable O’Kane said she chose the Ovarian Cancer Research Foundation as her charity because they are actively working to identify an early detection test for ovarian cancer.
“It’s good to have a cause I care about because that’s what gets me through the very long runs,” she said.
The New York City Marathon is over 42km in length and the average finish time is almost five hours.
We’re sure Detective Senior Constable O’Kane will smash it!
Visit the website to find out more about the important work the Ovarian Cancer Research Foundation is doing.
