'Crazy' schedule doesn't thwart Naperville doctor's quest for adventure

In the six years since he turned 60, Dr. Patrick Stiff of Naperville has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, camped near the North Pole, ascended to Buddhist spiritual sites and become a marathoner - all in search of "excitement."

It started when he picked up a magazine with one of those "50 places to see before you die" bucket lists.

It led him to a tour company that took a small group camping roughly 650 miles away from the North Pole in Svalbard, a group of Norwegian islands. The point was to see polar bears coming out of hibernation in March, the coldest month in the region.

But the year of Stiff's trip, there was an early thaw in January, leaving unusual sea ice conditions that pulled the bears onto the ice floes.

There were no polar bears to be seen from Stiff's campsite "despite freezing our behinds off every night in negative-20 degrees," he said. "I'm still cold."

But he still has a taste for adventure.

While preparing for his arctic excursion, Stiff hired a personal trainer. Since then, he's run the Chicago Marathon three times and completed "dozens of half marathons."

With a schedule even he calls "crazy" - waking up in Naperville between 4 and 5 a.m., making it to work between 6 and 7 a.m. and not leaving the Loyola Medicine Cardinal Bernardin Cancer Center in Maywood until 7 or 8 p.m. - Stiff trains at night. He runs between 9 and 10:30 p.m. and says it doesn't prevent him from sleeping like a baby afterward, as late-night exercise does for some.

While working as director of the cancer center, a professor of oncology, division director of hematology/oncology and co-director of the Oncology Research Institute, Stiff also has ascended to the base camp of Mount Everest in Nepal and scaled Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. On the latter climb, Stiff was credited with saving the life of a fellow doctor who suffered altitude sickness.

He got injured himself on another excursion - winter dog sledding in Sweden three years ago.

"I fell off and hit my head," he said.

The result? A concussion.

His most recent journey took him to Bhutan, where he climbed to the Tiger's Nest, a Buddhist temple complex nestled in a cliff.

His own travel bucket list is not yet complete, nor is his medical career.

As he mentors younger doctors and pursues advances in immune therapy and cancer vaccines, he's also itching to make it to at least two more exotic places: The Machu Picchu Incan fortress in Peru and the Patagonia region of Argentina on the southern tip of South America.