Surgeon Who Repaired Racer’s Heart Joins Him as He Puts It to TestBy Thomas Kaplan, The New York TimesA year and a half removed from open-heart surgery, Greg O’Keeffe decided to test himself. He would try to run a triathlon, and he would dare his surgeon to do it, too. “I figured, if I’m going to do it, why should I let him off the hook?” O’Keeffe said on the eve of Sunday’s New York City Triathlon. “He’s got a good heart to start with.” His doctor, Allan Stewart, first thought he agreed to a bike race, which seemed manageable. But then he received the registration materials and realized he had been signed up for a triathlon, which consists of a 1,500-meter swim, a 40-kilometer bicycle ride and a 10-kilometer run. His colleagues at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center told him he was out of his mind. |