A mini wrap-up, new stuff, and people whose 2018 has begun badly

The start to my 2018 has been unusually stressful, as much owing to venturing out of my comfort zone as to "problems." So far, after receiving a delightful and unexpected end-of-year pay bonus from my primary work client on December 31st, I've gotten into a minor car accident (I won't get into whose fault that might have been here), managed to misplace $100 in cash (a downstream effect of thinking I'd lost a debit card in December during a run without actually having done so), been interviewed by the Boulder Daily Camera about the Christmas morning death of one of my friends, and spoken at a Boulder City Council meeting concerning issues related to that death. I've also experienced a few other minor setbacks and frustrations lately, but nothing really new or worth writing about -- even in this space, which is clearly nothing more than a repository for cognitive flatulence that would otherwise be allowed to dissipate unnoticed.

But compared to Kim Duclos, I'm on pace to conquer the entire solar system by Saint Patrick's Day, including the Oort Cloud. More on that relentless one-monkey shit-war under the fold, but inasmuch as Kim's thought processes include any deliberation at all, she seems to have accepted that she has turned her own life into a bad joke from which she knows she will never escape, and is therefore willingly offering herself up as a rhetorical punching bag at regular intervals. (I know this theory is false, and that Kim is just an unbalanced dimwit who thinks that using the same shady tactics that have resulted only in the deepening of her own shame and sense of powerlessness 99 times in 99 tries will somehow prove fruitful on her 100th attempt. But as a comparatively normal person, I can't help but view others' behavior and decision-making through an everyday lens.)

I already summarized my 2017 from an overall perspective on my other blog. Since a lot of my life, however grudgingly at times, involves running, assessing how any given year has gone necessarily entails figuring out what was good and bad about my training, performances, outlook, and general relationship to the sport. Last year, having started on the ground fitness floor in December 2016, I worked up to consistent 65- to 75-mile weeks didn't miss a day of running until mid-July, and along the way managed a sub-par but not wildly disappointing 38:31 at the Bolder Boulder on Memorial Day. I weathered my midsummer knee injury with unprecedented composure (in years past, I often drank my way through such issues) but when I came back after my five-week layoff, I realized that what I suspected at the start of the year was mostly true: I just don't care enough about the possibility of rising to a less mediocre level to put a lot of focused work into that, even if my body allows it.

As I have said -- hell, even boasted -- a number of times in various ways here, the marginal utility I would enjoy from hard training versus doing about 35 to 45 miles a week of occasionally ambitious jogging (if nothing else, my everyday runs often dip below 7:00 pace without supreme effort on my part, which I guess counts for something) is simply not worth the mental and physical investment. Even if I could count on staying healthy, I would be looking at aiming for maybe low-16's for 5K at sea level in a best-case scenario, as opposed to being able to flirt with 17-flat by half-assing it. Since I contend that both of those performance levels suck more or less equally, I see no point in perturbing the remnants of my psychological equilibrium by treating running as one more realm in which to establish my inadequacy -- on the track, on the roads, or up mountains. Running for me always winds up being equal parts socializing and reflection time, as befits a noncompetitive road-race washout with a sketchy left ankle and a possibly perilous right meniscus.

But usually, when I say I'll never race again, I wind up consulting event calendars before long, and when I say I am aiming for a particular race, that race often fails to materialize. In any case, if I have a competitive goal at the moment, it's to beat my 2017 time at this year's Bolder Boulder. That's setting the bar low enough to ensure a high probability of success, but not so low that I'm at risk for stubbing my toe on it. Oh, and you can find me on Strava now. I only post about a third of my runs on there, because I'm using the phone app, not a watch, meaning that I have to carry my Android with me to record my runs.

I'm still peppering paying segments of the Web with running content. I have a piece on avoiding common marathon mistakes, cryptically titled "8 Common Marathon Mistakes to Avoid," that went live yesterday, one I really enjoyed working on mainly because of the sources I used. If you want to write capably about a given niche subject, learning to identify genuine expertise in your topic is not only absolute requirement for turning out something meaningful but also makes the writing process itself more fun. I'm now working on articles for why you should target a marathon (which is a belief I strongly hold but have no intention of putting into practice) and ways to avoid going out too fast in a race (SPOILER: THEY'RE NOT WHAT YOU THINK!). 95 percent of the time, I consider the idea of writing about running in a way that suits everyday consumers to be repugnant, mostly for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with running or runners or editors or anything obvious. But when I do come up with ideas for articles, I tend to be able to make hay of them, and I like what I do. I doubt I'll see my name on any book covers this year, but I will be taking on a larger role for MotivRunning. (I need to write a separate post about the genius of MotivRunning founder and longtime ally Brian Metzler, who's continuing to stay ahead of trends and make professional running media both useful and profitable.)

I'm continuing to work with a number of runners, one of them aiming for his second Olympic Games. I will defer the details of those endeavors to a subsequent entry so as not to taint the undiluted banality of this one with optimism about those folks. It's funny; even when I feel utterly hapless and fatalistic about my own running, I become fully, reflexively engaged in the quests of others to excel, whatever that means in their world. I'm gaining an increasing understanding of why this is not the contradiction it seems; and a lot of it simply revolves around acceptance, sometimes suffused in humor, that I am no different from anyone else in never quite having become the runner I aimed to be. All things considered, I'm lucky I can even walk in a straight line these days.

As for Kim, at the onset of 2017, I resolved for various reasons to not make her and her mindless antics a regular subject of this site. Having returned to serious training myself, I wanted the blog to be mainly about my own progress or lack of it, supplemented my observations about the sport at large. Kim, although perhaps suitable for a starring role in a future Netflix documentary titled Desperate Internet trolls and their Hilarious Attempts to Cover Their Asses, was never a known quantity in running outside of New England, and hasn't raced seriously since 2010, she has fully transitioned from a decent marathoner into a self-degrading producer of spite, lies, and outright psychotic nonsense; devoting words to the ongoing, largely repetitive lunacy of a non-runner on a running site looks increasingly like a task best suited for another venue and a waste of my time in general. (I won't say it's a waste of your time, because face it, Dear Readers, a few of you come here specifically to chortle at that shit.)

For another thing, I've moved most of my retorts to her behavior to Twitter. This has a number of advantages that I won't explain because they are probably evident to everyone besides the cognitively and emotionally challenged Ms. Duclos herself, and since she shows no signs of stopping her doggedly self-defeating activities, there's no reason to tip her off. So I won't even mention that I found a fun tool -- an automatic thread compiler. Wheeeeee!

Finally, I actually believed, or wanted to believe, that her campaign against me would wind down on its own. Not because I expected her to make a wise choice -- I understood long ago that she will always be an immoral, nasty mess -- but because I thought she might become distracted by another phantom grievance against another perceived enemy. As pathologically obsessed as she is with me, I'm not the first person upon whom she's focused her clueless and haphazard sputtering, so I thought she might transfer her attention to some other unfortunate soul or situation. Obviously this was short-sighted on my part; it's not as though jobless waterheads who haunt the Internet all day usually limit themselves to a single target. That is, they don't refocus; they diversify! Good for branding, I guess.

I'm going to save most of the details about what I consider the worst of her recent transgressions for another post, but I'll use this one to summarize her own 2017. It was another banner campaign of disjointed lies, grandiose and failed promises, IMAX-level psychological projection, obviously booze-fueled forays into social media using both her own name and pseudonyms, and attacks on people who don't deserve it (because I'm willing to hit back at least as hard as Kim swings, I no longer count myself as such a person, even if her smear campaign was initially unwarranted in the extreme and even if it's not a fair fight -- for all I know I'm in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act by merely acknowledging her).

At the beginning of the year, Kim was rambling on her since-deleted "140 Miles at a Time" blog (and for anyone who wants to read all of that mindless bullshit, I created a mirror copy that includes every post, most of which can also be seen here) about not only returning to the sub-elite level of running herself, but using this as a means to sponsor other runners.

Also, in a very Trumpian display or thermonuclear irony -- and possessing a similarly low-functioning brain, she puts on a lot of such displays -- she complained about having been bullied, but said she simply wouldn't worry about the bullies anymore.

She later posted four or five weekly training updates that were self-contradictory and clearly fabricated, like virtually everything else she displays to the world; soon afterward, she zapped the thing, most likely out of frustration that I and some others were heckling her elsewhere online.

Then, in April, she did what she usually does around her birthday (self-loathers notoriously dislike birthdays) and upped the insanity, leading to this and a variety of similar meltdowns.

Kim spent much of the summer writing bizarre things on Facebook and Twitter before finally making her Twitter feed private. This is entertaining in itself because it's at cross purposes to her goals. Kim knows that the only people who pay any attention to her are me, a few random schadenfreude fans here in Colorado and elsewhere, and other detractors she's screwed over in the distant and recent past, so in a hidden profile she's just talking to herself; on the other hand, her public stuff always ends in her targets ridiculing her. So she has settled on the strategy of pretending she has human followers and allies, when in fact she has neither.

There is a lot more I could, and will, describe in the near future (my work schedule gets a lot busier in another week, so I'd like to beat that clock given that I have better things to do that this even while comparatively idle). In fact, the sheer amount of crap Kim has posted and I've dutifully loaded onto my hard drive in the past year alone is astonishing. What you are seeing here can't even be one percent of it, although I've aimed for a sample with an above-average freak level.

But notice one thing: Although Kim Duclos is a coward who has used countless aliases to talk smack about me on a host of websites, she posted all of the stuff I've mentioned so far in this entry under her own name. That means that even though 95 percent of her bobble-headed shtick is lying about people for harmful effect, she is still too godawful dumb (or intoxicated, or crazy, or all three) to keep from embarrassing herself.

The primary reason I decided to return to this is not that Kim took to Reddit in the second half last year -- again under her own name -- to post more fever-dream lies about her student status, material that contradicts the already laughable, self-immolating mistruths she's splattered on LinkedIn and elsewhere. I don't fundamentally care that she uses publicly posted fantasies to escape the reality of her shitty, loveless, aimless life, and as someone who's felt the crush of general ennui here and there, I can kind of empathize with the feelings, if not necessarily with the choice of therapeutic outlet.

It isn't even that she used a bullshit Facebook account to attack one of my friends and former club-mates in a manner that revealed as much colossal jealousy as it screamed insanity. It's not that she recently admitted on Reddit that she straight-up hates it here and thinks her own boyfriend-cum-caregiver is, in her own words, a douche. I know she hates it in Boulder, and I wish she wasn't broke, employable only for very short bursts, and utterly dependent on her boyfriend for survival, because then she'd leave. (This would, of course, not put a stop to her complaining about me; if anything, it would probably only embolden her. Kim hates whatever surroundings she finds herself in, because she plainly hates herself, and wherever she goes, oops, there Kim is.)

I'm mostly doing this because she dragged Benji, a friend of mine who recently died, into this thread, using three different handles, pretending to have known him and stayed at the Boulder Shelter with him and more, all so she could once again "anonymously" claim that I'm a drunken criminal, a malevolent guy who attacks the very facility that keeps me alive via handouts and other forms of support and will never do anything with my life. (Remember what I said up there about projection. I doubt Kim has ever been inside the shelter, but she knows that if her boyfriend gave her the heave-ho, that or a similar place elsewhere is exactly where she'd wind up.)

I'll post the most significant screen shot from that salvo below as a placeholder. Even if you don't know the whole backstory, please understand what you're seeing here: Kim is posing as a lawyer serving as an advocate for the homeless, one who writes like a grade-schooler and casually declares "we need to remove the bad homeless from the bunch." This part is supposed to be about me: "He has a long, steady background of receiving support from shelters and other sources locally and across the country. There's no sign of trying to recover. He's not employed but has had some reports filed related to him scamming people for cash. He also has a long criminal history that is violent and the number of DUIs is something I haven't seen in my career up until this point." From there she goes on to say or at least suggest that I am actually living at the shelter myself, or something.

This is plainly grade-A1 fucking nuts, but there's an aspect of it that's extremely calculating. In her various handles in this thread, Kim is careful to not mention my name, and even orders others to not copy and paste text from the very article that she implores people to read, because she didn't want me or anyone to find the thread through Googling, and also didn't want to be on the hook for libel despite using a sham name. She knows, after all, that I saw her stuff about {attending-not-attending CU/Front Range CC/Colorado School of Mines} because when she saw what I'd written on Reddit about this, she deleted not only the posts but her duclok2 account. She knew I would visit the thread pertaining to Benji erelong.

But of course she has the IQ of a gnat, and fucked this up herself. Someone I know happened to see this yesterday before Kim or a moderator deleted it:

So, on it goes. As hard is it seems to believe, I have actually been holding back a lot in this stupid, two-year-long battle. The next thing that will happen is my posting screen shots of Google Hangouts conversations Kim and I had back in 2013, where she went turbo-TMI and unloaded on me a great deal of unsolicited and unwanted personal baggage, much of it sexual in nature and far beyond everyday ribaldry and tawdriness, and again reminiscent of Trump or at least certain rumors about Trump's Russian hotel stays. In this exchange, she also tried to get me to lie to a prospective employer on her behalf, and noted that she had no choice because all of her references at the time were fake.

Kim could make all of this stop very simply. If she reached out apologized to the people she's lashed out at or screwed over simply because they were unlucky enough to be in my orbit, and then went a solid six months without committing any more acts of aggravated online fuckery while intoxicated, I would remove everything I've said about her from the Internet. It's not like it makes me look like a shining star, even if I'm in the right. It's not like I ever even want to admit I coached her or helped her in any way. But she will never do this, and will probably wait a couple of weeks before renewing the cray-cray. She has only marginally more control over her behavior than a bullfrog swimming in LSD.

Maybe.