Everybody’s Scalin’ – When Enough is Enough

A crawling group can be a fickle beast. Most of the time it’s a gathering of buddies swapping stories and parts. A great way to spend the afternoon outdoors. There are certain individuals that can make it difficult, though.

I’ve been lucky in that my group, while being fairly large, has always been made up of great guys and girls. I’ve only had to “kick out” one member in the five years I’ve been doing this, and that was a pretty cut and dry case.

Unfortunately, that number has gone up to two.

I recently had to do the “dirty work” of notifying a longtime member that he was no longer welcome to run with us, thanks to conduct detrimental to the group. This actually happened a couple months ago, and I’ve waited to write about it so as to get a little perspective on it.

Most of us deal with a large amount of BS in our personal and professional lives, and we typically don’t have much of a choice but to put up with it. That should not be the case in the hobby.

Putting up with a jerk is especially troublesome in scaling, because when you are on a long trail run it’s a lot harder to just keep your distance than at say, a race track where you can just pit on a different side of the building.

Quick tangent- you know how you know that scaling is ultra popular? When all the bad racer stereotypes have now invaded. Brand warriors, insanely competitive comp crawlers who turn back yard meets into non-kid friendly affairs, “your set-up sucks, let me show you mine” type of folks….yeah, racers can poke just as much fun at us nowadays!

Anyways, back to the issue at hand. You know what? Despite being a very hard thing for me to do at the time, our group is much better for it. A little bit of pain wound up being completely necessary/justified.

Most clubs that have been around for awhile inevitably wind up dealing with this problem. It’s important to weigh your options on how best to handle it. In most situations I’ve found out that dealing with a headache member isn’t worth the trouble, and that goes for all involved. Sometimes you just need to say “enough is enough” and move on! Most times, you (and your club) will be happy you did.