A 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 NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center told him he was out of his mind.
Stewart, 41, and O’Keeffe, 28, were among the 3,000 triathletes to cross the finish line in Central Park, though they were hardly the fastest. Filip Ospaly of the Czech Republic was the top finisher with a time of 1 hour 46 minutes 28 seconds, and Rebeccah Wassner successfully defended her women’s title in 2:00:25, edging her twin, Laurel, who finished a little less than two minutes later in second.
But the way Stewart and O’Keeffe got into the race is a story worthy of a movie. O’Keeffe’s path to the triathlon began during his freshman year at Columbia, when he wanted to walk on to the baseball team as a left-handed pitcher. But because he had a heart murmur as a child, university doctors insisted he see a cardiologist.
It turned out O’Keeffe had a birth defect in his aorta, the main artery that pumps blood from the heart, and by 2008 he needed open-heart surgery to repair an aortic aneurysm. He chose Stewart, the director of Columbia’s aortic surgery program, to perform it.
“Without the operation, he would have been dead within a month,” Stewart said.
Although O’Keeffe’s surgery in May 2008 was serious — Stewart said it carried about a 10 percent mortality rate — it did not mean the end of his days as an athlete. (The former Yankee Aaron Boone had a similar operation last year and returned to the major leagues less than six months later.) Indeed, O’Keeffe said he felt pretty much back to normal after five weeks of rest.
But his recovery gave him time to reflect.
“I got to thinking, Hey, I’m going to take full advantage of my health now — I’m going to do a triathlon,” he said.
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