Katrina Bradley would have been in 5th grade this year, and though her friends from kindergarten will graduate and go on to middle school, they are thrilled to celebrate her joy-filled life once more with the annual Katrina’s Flight 3K Race.

Katrina’s father Ian Bradley said before she was born, they anticipated some health issues following prenatal diagnosis.

“She wasn’t breathing when born and had to be resuscitated,” Bradley explained.

She had heart defects as well as pulmonary hypertension, he said.

“An open heart surgery at one month old resolved most of her issues, but then we discovered she didn’t have any cartilage in her trachea, so she couldn’t come off the ventilator,” he said.

She got a trachea tube at two months old and a feeding tube at three months old, he said. She used a ventilator at home till she was about four years old and then weaned to using portable oxygen for the rest of her life.

“As soon as she learned how to do things, she was always eager to do as much as she could do,” Bradley said.

She began preschool, enrolled at the Early Learning Center at East Side Elementary and spent her kindergarten year at West Side.

During that year, she participated in a project in which kindergartners raised Monarch butterflies.

“Katrina loved them,” her teacher Vera Peters recalled. “We called each other high flyers, because we were good learners. She was a high flyer for sure, in all things.”

Peters said they often referenced the writer Henry David Thoreau’s quote, “Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.”

“Her life story was a beautiful flight that continues to fly on and land on many shoulders,” said Peters.

In May 2011, girls in the West Side branch of the national organization Girls on the Run presented a delighted Katrina with 1,000 origami butterflies.

“It was so special,” said Peters. “The whole school gathered and it was one of those things you are thankful you did for a child.”

Katrina passed away the following June at age five.

“Probably one of the most amazing things about Katrina was she was always very joyful, always social — she enjoyed being around people,” said Bradley. “She never let what she dealt with bother her. Every breath she took was painful, but she did everything she could. She loved to run around, loved to play, would attempt to do anything her classmates were doing.”

Bradley and Katrina’s brother Porter are very active runners. When they would go to Porter’s track practice, Bradley said, she would play with a friend of hers who was just starting to run. When that friend went to run on the track, 4-year-old Katrina decided it was time to begin running as well.

“She went down to the track, on a 400-meter track, and just started running,” said Bradley. “She made it about 80 meters, and I asked if she was okay. She took off running again. She wasn’t upset that she couldn’t keep up; she was just happy to make it an entire lap around the track running and did her best and celebrated the fact that she finished.”

In step with her love for life and eagerness to try everything, her family and Girls on the Run organized a 3K race called Katrina’s Flight to honor her and to also to raise money for the American Heart Association. In the first year, they raised $4,000.

Now in its fifth year, and the graduating year for those first runners, Peters said people come out in droves and work together to have a fun day together remembering her life.

He said the race is a celebration of her unbounded joy and inability to become frustrated.

“It’s an upbeat celebration of life, and that was exactly the kind of thing she liked,” said Bradley. “The race has been a big blessing for us; it’s always encouraging. We cherish the time that we had with Katrina, and we know there were a lot of people that were really influential in her life, and that helped us along the way. It’s always great to have that connection with those people and that we can still get together.”

He said his family was considering making this the last year for the race as it would have been her fifth grade year.

“We are so appreciative of Vera and Girls on the Run for continuing to put on the race,” he said.

It will take place on April 17 from 2-4 p.m. No cost or registration is required for the timed race, and if participants wish to donate to the American Heart Association, they may do so in cash.

Her garden will continue to be maintained at West Side by her grandparents and current students. On Wednesday, students signed the blocks which line her garden and took a framed photo outside of Katrina. They signed it when she was five years old and was releasing one of the butterflies they raised in class. Her father wrote a poem on it which reads “Sweetest heart flying free, running fast, diving deep, life unencumbered, wild or serene, rising up on butterfly wings.”