Isabella de la Houssaye, a lawyer and prolific endurance athlete who continued to go on daunting adventures around the world 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 house she had rented while continuing her treatments.
Mountaineering, marathoning and triathloning with her daughter and four sons were activities she undertook “in an effort to both teach them skills such as patience, focus, perseverance as well as an appreciation of nature,” Ms. de la Houssaye (pronounced de-la-hoo-SAY) said in an interview in 2022 on the NeoGenomics Laboratories website.
Ms. de la Houssaye began her endurance athletic feats, on her own and with her family, in the 1990s and continued for decades. She climbed Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa, with her children on separate ascents; finished more than 20 Ironman Triathlons; competed in many ultramarathons; ran in more than 70 marathons; and bicycled across Tasmania.
She and her husband, David W. Crane, started to encourage their children to participate in endurance activities when they were as young as 10 — “a radical form 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, one day after they ran in 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 getting into.”
The ascent was Ms. de la Houssaye’s first of any extremely high-altitude mountain, and it inspired Cason to climb the highest summits on the six other continents by the time he was 20. He is believed to be the first openly L.G.B.T.Q. person to scale them all.
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 better quickly, and she finished a marathon that April using walking poles. In June, she completed a marathon in Anchorage, and this time she didn’t need the poles.
Told that she might live for only six more months, she went on what might have been her final adventures with four of her five children in 2018 and early…
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