Longtime Friends Don't Let Political Differences Interfere With Their Running, Because They Haven't Spoken in 18 Months
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America’s political landscape has never been more polarized, with half the country seemingly viewing the other half as an existential threat, but two local runners with wildly divergent views have found a way to sidestep all of it—they stopped running together and, in fact, no longer speak at all.
“It’s really worked out well,” said Juliana Hatfield, 29, speaking of her decision to carve Leonard McCoy, 27, out of her life about a year and a half ago. “By sealing myself off from Leonard, I’ve been able to maintain my running routine with zero politics, none of that bullshit.”
It wasn’t always this way.
When they met during their sophomore year in college, Hatfield said, she and McCoy hit it off immediately. They both came from small midwestern towns, quoted the same movies, and loved to run. They were, as Hatfield puts it, “peas in a pod.”
“Politics never came up,” she said. “We just hung out and ran together a lot. Three times a week, at least.”
The relationship never got romantic, Hatfield said, explaining that “Leonard never made a move” and also that she is a lesbian.
That routine lasted beyond college, when both landed jobs in the same city. But then came the 2016 elections, and Hatfield began noticing a disturbing change in her longtime friend and training partner.
“Let’s just say Leonard started saying and sharing some pretty alarming stuff on social media,” she said. “From some truly bizarre sources.”
“Every time I tried to respond by pointing out that a certain meme or story had been debunked, or saying that a statistic he’d cited was just not correct, he would either dismiss me with a sarcastic remark or ignore me altogether.”
Things got worse, said Hatfield, and it quickly became clear that McCoy had gone “around the bend.” By the time McCoy shared posts advocating “conversion therapy” for gays and lesbians, suggesting that top Democrats were leading a child sex ring, and positing that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged as a pretext for a “gun grab,” Hatfield had seen enough.
“I blocked him on Twitter, Facebook, even on my phone, and haven’t talked to him since,” she said. “My mood improved immediately.”
Hatfield encouraged others to follow her lead.
“Today’s political climate might seem unbearable,” she said. “But as I’ve found, there’s always a way to rise above it.”
