"There's never a reason to pay for running plans"
So says a familiar bastion of virtually nonexistent -- yet somehow still deteriorating -- integrity. (Please click on that link if you're not familiar with the person I'm writing about or why I do it. Lize's post describes what is perhaps the apotheosis of this years-long and only slowly ebbing mess.)
Ever the merry prankster, Kim Duclos decided to take a training plan she asked me for in 2013 -- which she repeatedly promised to pay for and didn't, as detailed below -- and modify the dates on it before posting a link to it on Facebook. This was during the height of an aggressive and quite insane campaign that ultimately wound up with the two of us in a courtroom, during which it apparently somehow escaped her that the judge told her, in so many stern words, "Ma'am, please stop lying and wasting everyone's time. Leave this guy alone, and try to behave like you belong in the world." Of course, Kim hasn't stopped lying and hasn't left me alone, and has also decided to focus her yammering even more exquisitely on Lize, perhaps believing her to be a weaker adversary than me, or something. Dumb move.
Adding to the fun is that about a year before she came crawling back asking for my help, Kim, human irony and hypocrisy machine that she is, decided to position herself as an online coach, as I have previously described. This hasn't been the only instance of her trying to do this (see also this and this, and the corresponding screenshots here and here); in fact, while I was coaching her, she asked me to add her to my coaching page, which I did, albeit with due reluctance. Most telling of all, as you can see, she described coaching as a way for her to take advantage of "needy" people and make money in the process -- to do, in other words, precisely what she has accused me of doing.
The fact that this scheme, like countless other half-baked plans she's dreamed up, never got off the ground is irrelevant; it's the fact that this is how she sees coaching, other people, and life in general -- as things to exploit. Other people human beings are nothing but interactive cartoon characters with bank accounts, conveniences for her to get what she wants with no honest effort and it's how she continues to behave now.
Do I really care that someone is offering training schemes I've come up with to other people? Of course not; these aren't state secrets. In fact, here's the original. Have at it. And did I actually ever expect Kim to pay me a dime in 2013? Not really. Remember, this was during our second coaching go-around, after she had come out of the online woodwork after almost three years of silence with as much contrition as someone of her psychological constitution is capable of mustering, and based on the precarious personal situation she described herself as being in as well as knowledge of how she operates, I had no illusions of seeing any more money than I had during our previous stint. I did hope that she would turn herself around and, well, train, and be willing to discuss, you know, running, but even this proved too much to hope for.
What does annoy me that this dingbat continues to this day to refer to me as a scam coach, as someone who lacks the credentials or background to advise runners, as someone who rips off training plans from websites (I know, it's a howl but it's true), etc. etc., etc. -- and that she does so even after proudly serving up to other people ideas I created solely for her benefit while claiming them as her own, under the aegis of "sharing is caring." This is the work of an obnoxious, calamitous, unintelligent and unapologetic whack job, plus a few unseemly adjectives and nouns that escape me at the moment.
This has become a mostly pointless personal matter, I admit, since from a practical standpoint, Kim's frightfully obsessive mission to wreak havoc in my life -- and the lives of others whose names I won't mention here -- never amounted to anything other than ruining whatever existed of her reputation. Before 2015, when she started coming after me in earnest, she was probably the most anonymous 2:38 woman marathoner in American history thanks to never actually managing to make to the Olympic Trials despite qualifying for that race in 2010, and she hasn't raced seriously in over five years (her persistent habit of claiming that people like me are ruining "her" sport notwithstanding). But now, and increasingly so over time, even though this was never my original intention, anyone Googling her less-than-common name, especially in conjunction with terms like "running" or "employment" "Boulder," will quickly learn that her entire existence is founded on malice and bullshit. Her plot to use the Internet to "anonymously" screw me by blathering about my top-secret history of bulimia and alcohol struggles could not have worked any more thoroughly against her.
Dumb people can do serious damage if they are focused and sane; crazy people can do the same if they are canny enough. Kim is both dim and off her rocker, so realistically, the only way she can "win" this is by apologizing to the people she's laid into without cause (not me, I would laugh in her face, but the many other folks she's lashed out at in her fits of nastiness and intoxication), and genuinely moving on, perhaps even actually doing some of the many positive things she at the moment is only pretending to be doing. I even mentioned once that I would be willing to take down everything I've written about her if she could go a single year without relapsing into misguided and colorful shenanigans, but I won't hold my breath on this one.
The whole thing is, like almost everything this evil and oblivious clown brings to the world, both darkly comical and pathetic. While it's also pathetic that I regularly spend time writing about her, ignoring her only leads to even more egregious nonsense from her.