THE SUNDAY PROFILE : Because It’s There : It’s more than two years and $8 million away, but Dr. Neil Barth has his sights set on the challenge of a lifetime: racing his sloop around the world for the better part of a year.

Dr. Neil Barth is the last person out of the office. It is 10:30 p.m. on a day that started at dawn. His wife, Kerry, his three sleeping kids, a reheated dinner and another pile of work wait at home. But this work, a clutter of letters and notes, has nothing to do with his oncology practice in Newport Beach. This is about a dream, and by the time he quits the home office around 1 a.m., Barth is one step closer to sailing around the world.

Catch Barth in, say, February, 1998, and he and his crew will be racing a 64-foot sloop through the Southern Ocean close to the 60th parallel, where 50-knot winds and 40-foot seas create never-ending storms. His navigator will have an eye on the radar, where icebergs register as green dots. Another man on the bow will look out for growlers--submerged, school bus-size ice chips that can rip through a boat like a can opener.

The logistics of participating in the Whitbread Round the World Race, still more than two years away, consume Barth. The long shifts, the four hours of sleep each night, the practice racing have already begun. It is said of the Whitbread that getting to the starting line is more difficult than the race itself.

Every four years, about 20 competitors from around the world attempt the32,000-mile course around the Cape of Good Hope, through the Southern Ocean, around Cape Horn and across the Atlantic. Starting and finishing in England, the sailors land in Africa, Australia, New Zealand, South America, the United States and Europe. The trip takes eight months.

But dedication bordering on obsession is not enough to go this distance. The 1989 race, for instance, saw crew members washed overboard, one of whom drowned, and a skipper commit suicide. Courage--in Barth’s case a blend of stubbornness and adaptability, forethought and thoughtlessness, patience and mania--is required.

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Denna Bryant is in the fourth day of a bone-marrow transplant at the Hoag Cancer Center. Her breast cancer had spread to the lymph nodes under her arm. This type of cancer responds well to extremely high doses of chemotherapy, but the treatment destroys bone marrow. So Bryant’s marrow was extracted before the chemo, and it has now been replaced.

But the protocol, which Barth helped bring to Hoag 10 years ago, is brutal. Bryant has lost her hair and is complaining of severe diarrhea. She says she is exhausted. Barth holds a stethoscope to her back and listens. He nods as if he has been there before and explains that this is normal, that Day 4 is among the most difficult. Without transplantation, however, there is an 80% chance the disease will show up elsewhere in her body; with it, recurrence drops to 10%.

“My patients have more courage in their little fingers than I’ll ever have,” he says later. “I hope I have as much in the middle of the night in the Southern Ocean going down the face of a 40-foot wave as these people show every day.”

The center’s medical director, Robert Dillman, says Barth is particularly aggressive in his approach to cancer, working at least 70 hours a week, seeing up to 30 patients a day, and pursuing new therapies.

“At first, there was tremendous scrutiny and opposition to (the bone-marrow transplantation program),” Dillman says. “A lot of physicians would have asked: Is this ethical? Why are we doing it? But Neil kept his head to the grindstone and kept heading in that direction. . . . He’s not just stubborn, but confident that what he’s doing is right.”

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On a Friday night at the Orange Coast College Sailing Center, off Coast Highway, about 20 sailing enthusiasts have gathered over coffee to hear Barth’s navigator, John Jourdane, give a talk and show a video on the last Whitbread.

Jourdane, the only member of the 11-man crew to have sailed the race, introduces Barth and Jim Bailey, the project director for America’s Challenge, the syndicate that Barth has organized to help him prepare for the race.

America’s Challenge is also the name of the boat Barth recently purchased. It won the last Whitbread, and now serves as a training vessel for the crew and as a model for designers who will try to build a new and better contender.

If a boat were a muscle, America’s Challenge would be pumped. It is almost 65 feet long--big, but not huge for ocean-racing boats of this caliber. What is remarkable is its width--18 feet at the beam--and its completely exposed cockpit, aerodynamically engineered for easy sail handling. This is less a boat than a surfboard with sails. Down below, eight bunks are hinged to the sides. The galley is in the center, the head up front and the navigator’s station behind the companionway.

If most recreational sailboats travel at eight knots in the best conditions, this boat will do 16. During its last Whitbread, America’s Challenge, racing under its primary sponsor’s name--Yamaha--sustained 20 knots for hours on end. At that speed, water careens off the hull. A rooster tail plumes from the stern. And the crew works like mad--eight hours on deck, struggling to keep the boat upright and on course, and four hours off, trying to eat, get warm or sleep.

The Whitbread, however, is not always about speed. The doldrums, a stretch of ocean near the Equator that lies out of the trade winds and beneath a searing sun, offer their own challenges--unbearable heat, countless sail changes and a miserable feeling of lifelessness. The strain on the crew is intense, says Jourdane. The boats become pressure cookers.

“To sail around the world as fast as you can, with and against the best sailors in the world, is the ultimate challenge,” he says. “To conquer the capes, to follow the tall ships that raced around the capes--this is a historical heritage for sailors. We are following in the footsteps of the great grain races of the last century.”

For Barth, 42, it is about that, and something more personal: “My decision to do the race is really a visceral reaction. After following it from a distance and seeing my life come together to make it possible, I realize this is something I have to do.”

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Barth’s mother, Rosemarie, shares a three-bedroom Irvine townhome with his only child from his first marriage. Alison, 14, has cerebral palsy; she is cognitive but nonverbal. Her parents, who were divorced in 1983, shared custody for three years--until Alison’s mother, Caroline, was found to have cancer. She died in 1989.

Rosemarie, 74, dotes on her “precious, adorable girl.” They sleep in twin beds pushed together in a room decorated with pictures of the horses Alison rides, temporarily trading in her wheelchair, at the Fran Josswick Therapeutic Riding Center.

After almost 10 years together, Rosemarie knows her granddaughter’s subtle signs for yes and no, and she can interpret the sounds Alison makes to express various words, laughter and restlessness. They team up to talk on the phone, and Alison has been getting more and more calls from boys lately, her grandmother says, shaking her head. High school will start in September.

Their love is easy and difficult. Rosemarie will hear no talk about what might become of Alison when she gets too old to care for her. This is the same love that Rosemarie and her husband, Walter, showed their three children.

Neil’s childhood in Cleveland was marked by nothing more exceptional than the family’s unbending faith. At 13, he went away to a Catholic seminary. Although his parents dreamed of their son becoming a priest, they worried that he was too young to make such a commitment. They were right. After six months, Neil dropped out and started to spend much of his free time sailing on Lake Erie.

Life at home had grown uneasy. Walter was an obstetrician-gynecologist, accustomed to long hours and late-night deliveries. But, as the family explains it, the Pill and a declining birth rate began to cut into his practice. He enrolled in a training program in emergency room medicine. Rosemarie went to work, and Neil and his dad started to have problems. For a time, Neil moved out and got a job with a local sailmaker. He later went to college at Notre Dame, and as a junior in 1973, learned that his father, who had been fighting depression, had overdosed on Seconal. He was 55.

“I’m not sure I knew enough about what was going on in my dad’s head to be able to understand why he committed suicide,” Barth says. “Except that clearly, he felt he had not excelled in his medical practice.”

Then he adds: “One thing I remember most about him was that he didn’t have any interests outside of medicine. He was very hard-working but just didn’t have a lot of outside interests.”

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It is an unusual Saturday afternoon in the Barth house on Balboa Peninsula: Neil is at home, albeit dictating reports in his office. At the breakfast table, Ryan, 5, is making a space shuttle out of K’NEX. Chelsea, 2, is pounding Play-Doh. Mom, eight months pregnant, sits between them, helping out, while Sandy the golden retriever paces, waiting for anything to fall. Jaime, 4, is napping.

Kerry O’Neil, 35, came to Orange County from Massachusetts in 1982 with a bachelor’s degree in nursing. She was recruited by Hoag, starting in its oncology ward. Neil was three months out of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, where he did his residency and fellowship. He was also newly divorced and would sometimes bring then-3-year-old Alison to the hospital when on duty.

Kerry found him easy to talk to, and after Neil asked her out, they discovered they shared a Catholic childhood and a non-native’s view of Southern California. A few years later, they decided to get married.

That was in September, 1986, in the same week Caroline’s cancer was diagnosed, as Kerry remembers it. The engagement was not an easy time. Kerry worked in Neil’s office and made wedding plans. He managed his duties as the then-director of the cancer center, coped with Caroline’s treatment and Alison’s care and tried to relocate his mother from Ohio.

“Sure, it was a very difficult time,” Neil recalls. “But if you get so distracted by the pressures around you, you’ll never . . .,” he pauses, uncertain how to finish. “You just have to keep going. You can’t sit and wallow in it.”

Neil and Kerry were married in April, 1987. In May, Neil took Alison to her first communion, helping her walk to the altar with the other children.

Kerry does not recall when Neil first told her of his plan to race in the Whitbread. “When did I first hear about it--is more like it,” she says. “He had mentioned it in passing, but I didn’t realize that he was very serious about it until the boat arrived.”

She thinks she is no different than most wives who wish their husbands would spend more time with the family. “But Neil wasn’t brought up that way,” she explains. “He was brought up where the husband goes out and is the breadwinner. His idea of being a goodhusband is being a good provider.”

The strength of their marriage, she says, lies in their ability to adjust. They know that they cannot change each other. And they both believe that when the Whitbread is over in 1998, Neil will make more time for the family.

In the meantime, Kerry matches her husband’s energy. When Neil recently teased her about her plans to remodel their home, she turned to him, “Well, Mr. Whitbread, I don’t think they’re any bigger than yours.”

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In the dark down-below of America’s Challenge, Barth is struggling to fix the Sat Com-A, a communication system that transmits data--such as live video and audio feeds--from the boat to anywhere on the planet via satellite relay. Only it’s not working.

“Here we have a $75,000 system,” he explains, a little exasperated, “and I have to manually wrench it around so that it is pointing at the right satellite.”

Barth tightened his focus on the Whitbread only last year. He hopes to finalize the design of the new boat within eight months so it will be ready to launch at the end of 1996. In 1997, it will be trucked to the East Coast and raced by Barth and his crew across the Atlantic. That summer, they will tune up in a series of European races, and on Sept. 21 at noon Greenwich mean time, the Duke of York will fire the starting cannon.

To get to the starting line, Barth must raise $8 million. Sponsorships, merchandising and marketing play a huge role in this race. In January, Apple Computers withdrew its tentative backing of America’s Challenge because of earthquake damage to its facility in Kobe, Japan. Barth is now working double-time to refine an educational component of America’s Challenge, improving upon ideas borrowed from previous races.

For the last four months, he has coordinated the development of print, video, CD-ROM, even IMAX programs that will focus on different aspects of the race. Curricula ranging from physics and astronomy to geography and ecology will be prepared for elementary, middle and high school students across the country.

Barth acknowledges that education is a popular hook for would-be corporate sponsors, but he says it has also helped him find greater meaning in the race.

“Up until about two months ago, I was having difficulty finding a socially redeeming value to the race,” he explains. “I wanted to be able to say that I’ve not just done some willy-nilly sail around the world. I want to be able to say that when I’ve done this, I’ve left something a little better than when I started.”

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On Easter Sunday, the Barth family, including Rosemarie and Alison, got together for the first time in more than six months.

A subtle threat of guilt links Barth to his family and even his patients. He admits that he is “co-dependent,” that his desire to please others outweighs his need to please himself. The Whitbread is one of the few things Neil has done for himself, Rosemarie says.

“If I screw up,” Neil says, “a lot of people stand to suffer. I have a responsibility to watch what I do because I can profoundly impact, negatively or positively, a lot of people. That’s a weighty thought to consider from day to day.”

He is also prepared to give up the race--”even if it were Sept. 20, 1997”--if anything happens at home. Until then, the march toward the starting line keeps him awake even after the longest day.

“Do I really know what I’m getting myself into,” he wonders, thinking about the dangers of the Southern Ocean. “The thing that tweaks at my heart strings the worst would be that because of a selfish act, I would deprive myself of seeing my kids grown up. That plays hardest on the mind of all.”

It is, of course, the emotional chord that was struck in Barth’s own life and that still resonates today, especially at times when he wishes his dad could “see that his efforts in raising a son were successful.”

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Neil Barth

Age: 42

Native?: No. Born in Cleveland; came to Southern California after deciding that if he had to sacrifice his life to a residency, it would not be in snow; lives in Newport Beach.

Family: He and his second wife, Kerry, have three children--Ryan, 5; Jaime, 4, and Chelsea, 2--and a fourth due soon. He also has a daughter, 14-year-old Alison, from his first marriage.

On his biggest strength/weakness: “I’ve always gravitated to the hardest, the most difficult way of doing things. It’s a strange, masochistic bend in my character. I went through school making sails; I could have been a sailing bum. Instead, I chose to go into one of the most competitive and demanding professions.”

On perseverance: “When things get really bad, if you just put your head down and keep going, push forward and don’t look back, then you wind up over it.”

On the education curriculum he’s developing for the Whitbread: “I’m hoping that a kid, whether he or she lives in the inner city or Kansas, who couldn’t care less about a boat traveling around the world, might see a lesson in this: that if you dream hard enough and work hard enough for it, you can achieve what you want.”

On those who would criticize him for taking time away from his family for the Whitbread: “Come walk a day in my shoes, and then tell me what you think. Try going to work every day and deal with the issues I deal with, and then come home making sure you’re still the ideal dad. And you’re also supporting your mother and a pyramid of people underneath you, then see how critical you want to be.”