Meet the Ballarat woman leading the city’s Mother’s Day Classic five years into living with stage four breast cancer

Next Sunday, Kate Treacy will lace up for Ballarat’s Mother’s Day Classic fun run just as she has for the past nine years, except 2026 will mark her fifth year of living with stage four breast cancer that doctors say will never leave her. 

Treacy, a mum of two, has been an ambassador of the event for the past three years, which has become more than just a walk around Ballarat in autumn.

Tradition: The Mother’s Day Classic is an annual running or walking fundraiser for breast and ovarian cancer research. Participants dress up in pink and run or walk for four or eight kilometres, on behalf of or alongside loved ones battling the disease. 

• Treacy said her own diagnosis made her even more passionate about showing up for others “fighting the fight”.

A drastic change: In 2021, Treacy was diagnosed with breast cancer during the height of COVID - a diagnosis that would upend her health and alter the shape of her family’s future.

🗣️ “I called it a roller coaster to start with, not a fun ride,” she told the Brolga.

The struggle deepens: Initially diagnosed with stage two breast cancer, Treacy was told she would need a mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiation, with hopes she would be “on the road to recovery” within 12 to 18 months. But before surgery was complete, the cancer had spread.

• Doctors found cancer in her lymph nodes, then in five spots on her liver. By December 2021, after chemotherapy shrank the lesions enough to confirm they were malignant, Treacy received the news no patient wishes to hear.

🗣️ “I now had stage four, which basically means it’s metastatic breast cancer that spread to other organs,” she said. “I will live with it for the rest of my life.”

Life after diagnosis: These days, life has settled into something more manageable, but never back to what it was before.

🗣️ “My medication has fatigue side effects, so I can’t manage a 40-hour week,” she said. “It’s taken us a good three, four years to find a balance.

“Somebody will look at me and I don’t look sick, and they say, ‘you look fantastic’, or ‘you look great’, but internally, I’m fatigued.

“I’ve got bone ache, I have other side effects that affect my bowels. There’s days where I can’t get out of bed.”

“Invisible disease”: The disconnect, Treacy said, can be one of the loneliest parts of living with cancer.

🗣️ “People sort of look at you and go, ‘well, you don’t look sick’, and that’s frustrating, because I fight the fight every day, I struggle every day.”

Enjoy life: Treacy said the diagnosis has sharpened her sense of what matters. She and her family have made a point of taking trips back to Sydney to see loved ones, and heading on a South Pacific cruise together for what Treacy described as an “important family holiday”.

🗣️ “Life is short, so you’ve got to enjoy it,” she said.

Donning the pink: That perspective is part of what keeps drawing her back to the Mother’s Day Classic start line each year.

The Ballarat instalment of the Mother’s Day Classic is one of many events taking place on May 10 across West Vic. For more information on the Ballarat classic or any other locations, head to the official website.

Locals can also register for the classic and sponsor Treacy directly here.