Follow Some of the Rules: A Tribute to Lucas Horan

It was confirmed a few days ago that my friend Lucas Horan drowned in the Bay late last month. I first met Lucas in May 2017, when he made a Strava comment on a run of mine. That March, I set out to get back my course record (CR) on the descent from Vollmer Peak down the Claremont ridge to the gate on Stonewall Drive. 3.41 miles with a -7.9% grade, the last 0.68 miles of which are -18.7%. I'd been bombing down the Claremont ridge for 13 years at that point, and aside from the long-since-moved-away grad school friend who'd introduced me to ultra-marathoning, I'd never met anyone who actually thought you could run down the thing, let alone hell for leather on the edge of control. I was successful in my objective, getting the CRs for the full descent and the bottom half back.

Many Strava segments are (to my taste) short and uninteresting. To find a 3.41 mile section that is a natural downhill line is a rare treat. For it to be named "The Real Harvey Quadbanger" is a wonderful cherry on top. I don't know if Lucas technically created and named these segments, but I discovered their names at the time I met him, so he named them for me. I, on the other hand, name my segments practical things like "Bench to trailhead." After I posted this run and reclaimed my crowns, Lucas reached out. We'd never met, but he was looking at downhill segments in the East Bay hills and noticed that I'd run many of them.

Lucas
"Want to try and set a after dark PR on quadbanger?"

Me
"Uhh, yes! I don't know if you're talking about tonight or just generally. I have happy hour plans today, but could maybe go late. Or Sunday?"

Lucas
"Later the better"

To anyone who knew him, this is all perfect Lucas. Reaching out to a perfect stranger proposing to run down one of the steepest hills in Berkeley in the middle of the night. That May we started from the steps at the top of Dwight as the sun was already setting. No course records, but I'd made a new friend before I made it back to the car.

Running has introduced me to many "Do you like those shoes?" or "So ... do you have any races coming up?" acquaintances, but relatively few "Let's go grab a beer and talk about life!" friends. I instantly knew Lucas was the latter. I had a couple work trips abroad and was busy completing academic job applications that fall, so runs together were rare but always memorable. Single into my 30's, emotionally distant from my parents and physically distant from my siblings, I formed the habit of turning holidays into all-day adventure runs: running from my office on UC Berkeley campus to Mt. Diablo and back, or running the Skyline to the Sea trail up and back, or some such. Then I met Lucas, and did he want to run the 36 mile Ohlone Wilderness for Thanksgiving? Of course he did. On his birthday, a few of us set out from the Dwight Avenue steps, went around the fencing to the Grizzly Peak summit and continued down the ridge until we stumbled across a treehouse. A rickety affair with multiple levels of increasing ricketiness, it should go without saying that Lucas climbed higher than anybody else. I'd been wanting to show Lucas a descent off the hills he'd never done, so we started in that direction. I quickly remembered that it was fenced at the bottom, and my dog would be unable to get under or over the 10 or 12 feet of chain link and barb wire. Lucas definitely still wanted to try it, but I out-stubborned him and we went back the way we'd come.  

It's rare for me to have friends that make me feel like I'm the one who's a stick in the mud on an adventure. I mean, I'm all for trespassing in the name of a good run, but I prefer to only do enough to have some plausible deniability if we get caught. Lucas thought fences were mere suggestions, and you didn't even need to wait till no one else was in sight before heading up past the obvious "Closed for Restoration" sign. Maybe that just makes us equally law-abiding and I'm more devious and Lucas more open and honest.

I moved to Washington DC in summer 2018, but managed to see Lucas at a few races over the next year. We played cat and mouse a bit at these races, excited to be at the same and race and reconnect, but sometimes not getting to talk much. Then after one Bay Area race, for a brief moment we thought we might be taking the same red-eye flights to DC, since I was headed home (just regular Garret stuff) and he had last minute tickets to watch the Nationals in the World Series with his cousin (just regular Lucas stuff). We weren't actually on the same flight, and we had trouble finding time to actually meet up in DC between my work schedule and the baseball games.

That weekend I was running the Marine Corps Marathon, and I guess I convinced Lucas to buy a bib off eBay and run it as well. It was pouring rain at the start, and I was running a little late, so we weren't able to meet up. With 30,000 runners I wasn't able to cross the start line until five minutes after the start. I immediately started aggressively weaving in and out to pass people to try and get to the thinner crowds at the front with slightly faster (or, less slow) runners more my pace. With such dense crowds, I lightly brushed a few runner's swinging elbows with the back of my hand to let them know I was passing. I did that again, and then felt a poke in the back. What was that? Again. Jeez, what was that? Was someone mad that I'd lightly brushed by them? One more poke. I turned around. Lucas! In a sea of 30,000 people squeezed into a two-lane road, I'd run into Lucas, who was just trying to get my attention. 

That was the joy of knowing Lucas.  

That is not to say it was all joy. For every magical midnight run, I also found myself saying "You can't just [X]" to Lucas every so often. He asked me for advice on thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, and I tried to help him strategize how to get a sabbatical from work to be able to do so. I thought his enthusiasm was wonderful, but I guess I assumed he'd understand some of the differences between his usual 50- to 200-mile ultramarathons and a 2,100-mile backpacking trip a little better. Once the pandemic hit and plans changed, he texted me about a last-minute adventure run in the Wind River Range, where I have backpacked a few times on my thru-hikes of the Continental Divide Trail. I poo-poohed his plans with "It's not really a spur of the moment mountain range." The range is very remote, and trailheads are hard to get to, I thought. More appropriate to backpack in, set up a basecamp, perhaps. Or maybe I was just jealous that I was riding out the pandemic in DC and Lucas could apparently head to Wyoming at a moment's notice. He pulled off a 50-mile loop without too much difficulty.

That's what I'm left with. Knowing Lucas was a joy. The tradeoff was losing him far too soon. I don't know if there's anything else useful to say. Part of me wants to yell "Boating safety!" as loudly and angrily as I can. All of me wants to give Lucas a hug and go for a run and catch up like old times.