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by running in the NYC Marathon
Pat Hannafin wasn't a runner.
Not really. Not ever.
Not when he was 15 ... or 25 ... or 35 ... or ...
Well, you get the picture.
"I played a little basketball, maybe" the West Brighton resident said recently. "But run? Nah."
And if you asked five years ago what he thought of the idea of lining up at the foot of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge with almost 40,000 other people on a Sunday morning and running 26.2 miles, Hannafin would probably have said that it sounded like lunacy.
That would have been an understandable response, too, for a guy who worked with his back and his feet all week. At least, it was understandable right up until that day that changed everyone around here.
Like a lot of people from Staten Island, the 50-year-old father of two wasn't just touched by 9/11. He, and the rest of his family, was steamrolled by it.
His brother, his kid brother, Tom, went down in the Towers. He was a firefighter out of 5 Truck in Greenwich Village.
One irony of Tom Hannafin's story was that the guys from 24 Engine, who are out of the same house as 5 Truck and arrived on the scene at the same time, all went in one door together and escaped the collapse basically unscathed. All 11 men from 5 Truck, including Hannafin, went through a different door.
None came back out.
On that day, lives changed -- and vanished -- on the strength of what door you walked through.
Pat Hannafin was 10 years old when Tom arrived, the last of six boys born to a hard-working mother and father who ran the Maine Avenue Market, a deli in Westerleigh.
It was a seven-day-per-week occupation, and everyone had responsibilities to make the enterprise work.
"I was the right age to be home changing Tom's diaper while my mother and father were in the store," Pat explained the other day.
The youngest Hannafin would turn out to be a natural athlete.
"He was a fighter," his brother remembered. "Tom could hit righty or lefty from the time he was a little kid, and he picked up everything right away."
And when he became a rock-solid basketball player at Susan Wagner High School as a teen, the family assembled in the stands to watch. And when Tom moved on to some very good College of Staten Island teams, they did the same.
He wasn't the high scorer on those tournament-caliber Evan Pickman-coached clubs, and at 6-foot he wasn't the team rebound leader, either. But Hannafin was Pickman's lock-down guy. He was the bulldog defender who drew the best opposing player, the guy who stuck his nose in it every time.
That's why Pat panicked the day 11 years ago when he first heard radio reports of a bad fire on Watts Street downtown.
"They were saying some firefighters were badly hurt," he said. "I started rushing around trying to find out if Tom was working."
He wasn't, it would turn out.
But Islanders John Drennan and Chris Siedenburg and Queens resident John Young were. They all died.
"That really took a toll on Tom," his brother said.
Then came 9/11.
In the aftermath of the attack, and the losses to the FDNY, there were memorials and remembrances everywhere in this city. One was planned that fall at the Scott LaPiedra Run, an Island road race that honors a lost firefighter of an earlier time.
Pat received a call from the LaPiedra folks wanting to now if one of the Hannafins was interested in running in Tom's name. Problem was there were no runners in the family. At least not any who were ready for a road race.
The race organizers said not to worry. They'd have a firefighter carry the Hannafin name, instead. But that idea didn't sit right with the older brother. Oh, he was grateful enough. That wasn't the issue. But in the end, he felt a responsibility, especially to Tom's children Thomas and Kayla.
So, at 46, though he'd never tried a race of any distance in his life, Pat Hannafin entered the LaPiedra Run cold. He was anxious, for sure. But almost as soon as the race began, Hannafin felt something special while jogging across the streets of Staten Island. A sense of, well, peace came over him.
"It was like therapy," he'd say.
It felt so comforting in fact that Hannafin kept right on training after the race was over. And by the following year he'd worked up enough courage to enter a half-marathon. Then he ran another ... and another.
Along the route, he'd think of his kid brother; about how determined and tough-minded he'd been all his life.
"It made the running a lot easier," Pat said.
In 2003, Hannafin joined the New York Road Runners Club, which has put on the NYC Marathon every fall since 1970. The first year, there were 127 runners who each paid a $1 entry fee to run a course around Central Park.
Now, the five-borough marathon is the biggest road race in the world. The most storied, too. And everyone who runs today is out there for a reason.
Some are gearing up for the Olympic trials. Others are attempting to stake out an international name. Plenty more are otherwise average people in every way. They're old and young; sick and healthy. Maybe they entered the race to prove a point. Or try to win a bet.
Or maybe, as in the case of Pat Hannafin, they're just trying to remember someone.
Which is a reason as good as any, and better than most.
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