Louise Cooper: The Race of My Life
The Race of My Life: Two bouts of breast cancer have taught me the importance of living for today.
Living a full life takes the same kind of unrelenting determination as conquering cancer: having a plan, executing the plan, and living each day as if it is your last.
—Louise Cooper
I've lived my adult life by three guiding principles I learned as an adventure racer: to set goals, to determine how to achieve them, and to persevere in the face of adversity. Those standards helped me complete more than 70 marathons and 7 Ironman competitions, and they helped me conquer breast cancer twice.
The first time was 17 years ago, when I was just 44 and found a lump in my left breast. The diagnosis was HER2-positive ductal carcinoma in situ. Because I had early-stage disease and my oncologist was aware of my athleticism and my desire to preserve as much of my upper body muscle mass as possible, he recommended a partial mastectomy (rather than a total mastectomy) and an aggressive course of trastuzumab (Herceptin) plus carboplatin and docetaxel, followed by 6 weeks of daily radiation therapy.
Because trastuzumab was so new in the clinic—the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had approved the drug just a few weeks after my diagnosis—my oncologist wasn’t sure how effective the treatment would be for me. But 2 years later, there were no signs of cancer in my body, and for the next 15 years, I was able to continue with my active lifestyle and my teaching career uninterrupted.
Then, in 2014, I was diagnosed with a second breast cancer in the same breast. This time it was triple-negative disease, and after consulting with my medical team, I decided to have a contralateral prophylactic mastectomy. After the surgery, I had several more rounds of combination carboplatin and docetaxel chemotherapy. Today, I am once again running marathons and working out daily, although not at the level I was able to achieve before this second cancer.
Louise is a two-time breast cancer survivor and has spent a lifetime erasing boundaries in her mind. She is an ultramarathon runner and Eco-Challenge competitor, and she has climbed the highest summit on each of four different continents.
“I’m very visual, and I visualize myself doing these things,” Cooper says. “I could always look at something on television or hear about something, and say, ‘Oh, I want to do that too.’ I guess if there is a fear, it’s a fear of missing out on something.”
Just five months after completing chemotherapy for breast cancer in 1999, Cooper finished the “world’s toughest footrace,” the 135-mile Badwater Ultramarathon, which begins 279 feet below sea level in Death Valley, California, and ends at an elevation of 8,360 feet.
At age 66, Cooper continues to teach kindergartners, and is the chief inspiration officer of Project Athena, an organization that helps women who have had medical setbacks get on their feet again. “The founder, Robyn Benincasa, and I, we’ve both had medical setbacks in our life, which we didn’t allow to stop us from pursuing whatever we wanted. We saw how sports and having a goal really helped with the healing process. Project Athena encourages people who’ve had setbacks to find a new athletic goal. We train them, we coach them, and we give them a team experience. Doctors heal your body, but we try to heal your soul.
"My biggest thing is trying to help people break down the barriers they have created for themselves. If people are willing to step out of their comfort zone, there is a world out there that is life changing.