Saturday, Jill Gardiner said, was the perfect day for a walk. And Conimicut Point the perfect place.

Gardiner, a fitness instructor, has been dealing with Stage 4 breast cancer since she was diagnosed in March.

“I started having back pain, and I didn’t know why I was having back pain,” Gardiner said. “I ended up getting admitted into the hospital because it had metastasized in my spine.”

To help raise funds and awareness for cancer, Gardiner, with friends and family, organized a Susan G. Komen walk at Conimicut Point. Komen died of cancer in 1980; her foundation, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, was started by her sister, Nancy Brinker, two years later.

Gardiner said her fight against breast cancer, however, was not just her own – it was also her mother’s.

“In 2014, my mother passed away,” Gardiner said. “She did chemo for a while; she did a whole year’s worth of treatment before she succumbed to it. My mother was amazing through the day she passed away.”

Kathleen Kennedy, Gardner’s mother, had had breast cancer previously, in 1999, and recovered well enough to continue working out daily. Gardner wore a shirt to the walk featuring a large picture of Kennedy on an exercise bike.

Gardiner said that her experience had been completely different from her mother’s, marveling at how the technology to treat breast cancer had advanced in only a decade.

“It’s totally different,” Gardiner said. “I didn’t have to do an IV chemo where I lost my hair. Mine’s an oral chemo that I take. I went back to work after 13 weeks of being out and felt great. I’m back to teaching classes.”

More than 50 people turned out for the walk, which consisted of four loops around the park starting at 11 a.m. Gardiner said two of those loops were in support of her, while the other two were to pay respects to the memory of her mother.

Among the multiple Susan G. Komen walks held nationwide, Gardiner’s stood out. She has raised $2,500 for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, which she said had been a major help to her throughout her battle and has led to an upcoming interview with the foundation about her work.

Following in her mother’s footsteps and seeing the changes in cancer treatment firsthand, Gardiner said, made it even more important for her to raise money.

“I would love to take this further,” Gardiner said. “I would love to be that person… I want to tell my story for people, and I find it cathartic for me to talk about it. There are survivors, people who come into my classes and tell me they had breast cancer 10 years ago, which gives me hope seven months in.”

Doctors have told Gardiner that getting rid of the cancer is not an option, but that it can be managed. With fully curing it out of the picture, she’s hoping that she can instead live with it for a long time.

“Mine will always be there,” Gardiner said. “But it’s treatable, so we’re just hoping it stays treated forever.”