Isabella de la Houssaye, a lawyer and prolific endurance athlete who continued to go on daunting adventures all over the world along with her five children after being diagnosed with Stage 4 non-small-cell lung cancer, died on Saturday in Hermosa Beach, Calif. She was 59.
Her son Cason Crane said she died of the disease at the home she had rented while continuing her treatments.
Mountaineering, marathoning and triathloning along with her daughter and 4 sons were activities she undertook “in an effort to each teach them skills equivalent to patience, focus, perseverance in addition to an appreciation of nature,” Ms. de la Houssaye (pronounced de-la-hoo-SAY) said in an interview in 2022 on the NeoGenomics Laboratories website.
She began her endurance athletic feats, on her own and along with her family, within the Nineties and continued for a long time. She climbed Kilimanjaro, the best mountain in Africa, along with her children on separate ascents; finished greater than 20 Ironman Triathlons; competed in lots of ultramarathons; ran in greater than 70 marathons; and bicycled across Tasmania.
She and her husband, David W. Crane, encouraged their children to take part in endurance activities once they were as young as 10 — “a radical type of parenting,” as Cason called it in a phone interview. They first climbed Kilimanjaro with Cason, her oldest child, when he was 15. They decided to scale it as an afterthought, at some point after they ran within the Kilimanjaro Marathon.
“It was offered as an option after the marathon,” she said on the “Long Run” podcast in 2020. “I don’t know if either of us knew exactly what we were moving into.”
The ascent was Ms. de la Houssaye’s first of any extremely high-altitude mountain, and it inspired Cason to climb the best summits on the six other continents by the point he was 20. He is believed to be the primary openly L.G.B.T.Q. person to scale all of them.
Her athletic activities stopped when she was diagnosed with lung cancer in January 2018 — but only temporarily. The cancer had already spread to her pelvis, brain, spine, sacrum and adrenal gland. But two drugs targeted for non-small-cell lung cancer made her feel higher quickly, and she or he finished a marathon that April using walking poles. In June, she accomplished a marathon in Anchorage, and this time she didn’t need the poles.
Told that she might live for under six more months, she went on what might need been her final adventures with 4 of her five children in 2018 and early 2019. With her son Oliver, she hiked greater than 500 miles of the Camino de Santiago, a medieval pilgrimage route in Spain. With Cason and her husband, she ran a marathon in Alaska.
With her husband, a lawyer and investment banker who’s now the under secretary of energy for infrastructure; her daughter, Bella Crane; and her sons David and Cason, she finished a 100-kilometer ultramarathon in Kazakhstan. Per week later, with David, she competed in a full Ironman triathlon in Gurye, South Korea.
In January 2019, when Ms. de la Houssaye and Bella began their ascent of Aconcagua in Argentina, the tallest summit within the Americas, she weighed lower than 100 kilos. Chemotherapy had made her bones brittle, her respiration capability had diminished, and she or he had life-threatening tumors in her brain. During the climb to the 22,840-foot summit, she and Bella faced brutal winds and subzero temperatures.
When they reached base camp, at 14,000 feet, declared that Aconcagua can be her last mountain.
“I don’t think I can do that anymore,” she told Rebecca Byerly, a reporter who followed her and her daughter on the climb for The New York Times. “I’m going to take every day at a time but don’t have any illusion that I’ll get to the highest.”
One freezing night, the altitude made Ms. de la Houssaye sick. She vomited several times in her tent and spilled a bottle of urine.
“Bella cleaned it up, and between otherwise silent bites of eggs and pancakes at breakfast, she said, ‘I forgive you, mother,’” Ms. Byerly wrote.
“Ms. de la Houssaye checked out her daughter, and her gaunt face lightened with laughter.
“‘This sure was a technique to bond,’ she said.”
When they left the subsequent camp, at 19,600 feet, Ms. Byerly wrote: “Isabella had a determined look in her eyes and kept a gradual pace. When Bella broke down with fatigue 500 meters from the highest, it was Isabella who convinced her daughter that she could make the summit, just as she at all times had.”
At the highest of Aconcagua, mother and daughter embraced, and Ms. de la Houssaye wiped tears from her eyes.
Isabella Livaudais de la Houssaye was born on Feb. 2, 1964, in New Orleans and raised in Crowley, in southwest Louisiana. Her father, Benton Cason de la Houssaye Jr., was a physician. Her mother, Isabella (Livaudais) de la Houssaye, served at different times because the mayor of Crowley and a city councilwoman.
Ms. de la Houssaye majored in politics at Princeton University and received a bachelor’s degree in 1986. After graduating from Columbia Law School in 1990, she joined the law firm White & Case, where she specialized in international law. She moved to Lehman Brothers in 1997 and worked on the firm’s administrative side until leaving in 2005 to deal with raising her children.
In 2008, she became an owner of Material Culture, an art and antiques retail store and auction house in Philadelphia. She lived in Lawrenceville, N.J.
Ms. de la Houssaye, who had at all times been an athlete, began endurance running with a 100-kilometer race she worked during a part of her time at White & Case, and added to her credentials for many of the remaining of her life.
After climbing Aconcagua in 2019, she competed in lots of events, including the Ironman Arizona along with her youngest child, Christopher. Three years later she finished the Ironman Cozumel in Mexico with all five of her children and eight members of her clan.
In 2020, she bicycled across America along with her husband, from San Diego to St. Augustine, Fla. (with a stop in Austin, Texas, for chemotherapy), to lift awareness about lung cancer. In 2023, she walked in marathons on Jan. 31 in Antarctica and, two days later, in Punta Arenas, Chile, with Cason and Oliver.
“Recovery wasn’t in her vocabulary,” Cason Crane said, referring to his mother’s insistence that they do the 2 exhausting events so closely together. He added, “You checked out this 5-foot-2, 85-pound frame, and also you’re pondering that the one technique to understand that is the incredible power of the human mind.”
In addition to her husband and kids, Ms. de la Houssaye is survived by her mother; her sisters, Elise de la Houssaye Frantzen and Nadia de la Houssaye; and her brother, Benton Cason de la Houssaye III.
She was participating in an experimental drug program in Los Angeles in her final days but nevertheless desired to compete on Nov. 12 within the Athens Marathon by having Cason push her in her wheelchair.
At Thanksgiving, he recalled, she said to him, “You need to email the Athens Marathon people and tell them I’m still doing it.”
“I didn’t have the guts,” he said, “to say it had already happened.”
