I’ve got a situation that’s been brewing with a sort-of friend, and I could use some advice on how to deal with it.
So I took up running a few years ago, and I’ve made lots of new running friends along the way. In the past few months, several of us have gotten in the habit of meeting for dinner after runs, we have a group on FB, etc. So basically a bunch of people who all know each other and are in fairly constant contact.
One of these, I’ll call her “Alice,” is starting to get on my nerves, as well as those of a few others in the group.
First off, she is Chatty Cathy personified. She dominates every conversation, and she is loud. She works in the medical field, and likes to talk about her patients (no HIPAA violations, just TMI, especially for those of us who aren’t medical types and don’t need to know what drugs she chose to treat what condition, and don’t care) as well as armchair-diagnose OUR problems. (You might say, well, don’t talk about them in front of her, but part of running chatter is discussing injuries and such. And she is always the expert.)
She is a slow runner, which is fine; most of us are not speedsters. But she is always reminding us of how she’s so slow, and people give her the stink-eye, and she was so bad off after X race and had to be tricked into going into the medical tent, and she’s always dehydrated because she has a particular condition, and she has to carry this and that with her, and her training plan always has so many more miles than anyone else’s. We are apparently supposed to be fascinated by all of this even though we’ve heard it a hundred times.
She often asks others to do things for her that she could do herself. She recently asked me if I could bring a sweatshirt for her to wear after a race that a bunch of us were going to be doing, because she was going to be arriving at the last minute from work. (1) She is large and I am not, and why she thought I would have anything that would fit her is beyond me. (2) Can she not bring her own sweatshirt? Was she planning to come to the race in the nude? She frequently asks a friend to carry things for her: money, ID, extra energy gels. Get an extra pocket for your fuel belt! We are not your pack mules!
The kicker was this past weekend, when our team (of which she was a member) ran a relay race of about 50 miles. I had pretty much been acting as de facto team captain. I worked on assigning legs to each team member, I designed, ordered, and distributed the team shirts, I provided the team vehicle (our minivan) and stocked it with water/ice/supplies, printed out the leg maps and made notes to help us keep track, and a zillion other things that needed to be done, because the others were stepping up very little and just saying “I’ll do whatever” without actually claiming any duties.
So the team got together the night before the race for dinner and to hammer out final details. We decided that although various people were bringing general snacks to share, each person would be responsible for bringing whatever essential lunch foods she needed, since we’re all different and would be running at different times. After dinner, as we all were leaving the restaurant, my friend “Lisa” and I said we were stopping off for a few groceries before we went home. So Alice asks me if I can pick her up “some cold cuts.” Huh? You have your own car, can’t you pick up your own stuff, like we said? “But you’re going anyway!” Ugh. I told her I had already taken care of a zillion details on behalf of the team, and spent plenty of money besides, and she could pick up her own lunch, like we said. So THEN she starts waving twenties at me! “I’ll pay for it!” Alice, it’s not about the money. It’s about being a grownup and taking care of things yourself.
So, the relay. Six women in my minivan, all day long, driving along the course while the current team member is running, and switching off at the exchange points. Alice drove Lisa and me crazy all day, with the constant yakking, negative talk about herself, general loudness, yadda yadda. Lisa told me that Alice hinted that she wanted to join Lisa and me on a trip we’re taking for a race later in the year. Lisa said nothing (she’s not good at confrontation). And she kept talking about how we should all come and cheer for her next weekend at a race that none of us are running, and then go have a “team brunch” afterward. Nobody was taking her up on it. On the way home as we were dropping people off, Lisa actually told Alice at one point to use her “inside voice” (which she did).
After we dropped Alice off at her house, it was just me, Lisa, and “Kim” left in the car. I SO wanted to blow off about Alice with Lisa, but not with Kim in the car, because for all I know, she and Alice are BFFs. So I just said, “Well, MY ears are full,” knowing that Lisa would know what I meant, but Kim would think I was just talking about being in a van full of people all day. But Kim IMMEDIATELY said, “Oh, I’m so glad you said that! I thought it was just me!” and so we had a good three-way bitch session about Alice on the way home. Turns out at least one other team member was getting annoyed as well.
So we are thinking that we need to back off from Alice, or get her to back off, especially from anything that involves traveling together. Trouble is, there are always running events, some of which involve driving, and we’ve set a precedent of car-pooling. I am happy to carpool with others, but not with Alice anymore. But she’s going to want to. AND (I’m still kicking myself) she is on our team for a similar relay race this fall. (I’m secretly hoping that she will injure herself and not be able to come.) That was arranged before she really started to get annoying, unfortunately. So we still have to deal with her for one more event.
I’m trying to picture these conversations. I can totally see her thinking it’s because she’s slow, but it’s not. but telling her the truth isn’t much kinder. There’s really no specific behavior that we can ask her to work on, because it’s all just her personality. She’s just brash.
So it looks like evasion is the way to go. “You want to be on our team for next year? Gosh, I’m not ready to think about that yet” (while I’m actually putting a team together in advance, leaving no room for her). OR “I think it would be fun to mix it up and have different people on our teams every year” (meaning “not you”). “You want to ride along with us to X race? Oh, I think we’d just like to drive up separately.”
Trouble is, I don’t want to have to lie (in case I have to defend it). I know about the Miss Manners method of just saying blandly, “Oh, I’m sorry, but we just can’t,” but I can just see Alice harping on why. And there are still the regular local fun runs to deal with. I just can’t see doing dinner/brunch after EVERY ONE if she’s going to be there, well, being herself. The others, fine. But not her. But the fun runs are public events and we can’t “not invite” her. I don’t want to be sneaky and tell her we’re not doing dinner and the have everyone sneak off to have dinner without her. She knows a lot of the local running people . . . and I have to wonder how many feel the same way that we do, but are humoring her.
Thanks for reading this far. I was hoping to keep it short, but obviously that didn’t happen, even though I’ve left stuff out. Any thoughts or suggestions will be much appreciated.