Ok, this is gonna be more of a rant than an actual post but maybe people can relate/offer advice...
I joined this run club shortly before the pandemic and it was pretty much just a few guys who had run in college, older marathon runners, and then a small group of people like myself who had run less seriously (in high school or D3 college, stuff like that) but still wanted to run and stay in shape. It wasn't exactly what I was looking for but it gave me people to run with so it was fine.
Then, after the pandemic the whole makeup of the club started to change. The age started trending younger and by the time we were having club runs fully back to normal, there was a bigger group than I'd ever seen before. What was cool was it was mostly young professionals just starting running for the first time or who had started during the lockdown. I won't lie, it was a big motivator to keep going because there were tons of cute girls showing up all the time and the vibe just got a lot more social. Initially I thought this was perfect, it made my running time and social time mesh together and I wasn't stuck running with this small group (some of whom were older than my parents). But over the last year or so, it's actually started getting annoying.
So now, the group runs are massive and there's always people running with selfie sticks or taking photos before we head out. This is a pretty minor annoyance but it underlines what the whole vibe of the club has become. The real annoyance though, is that the club is the de facto dating scene for a lot of these people. This sounded good at the start (who wouldn't want cute runner girls to get to know and hook up with?) but I didn't realize how much stupid high school drama would be brought with it. The people who go regularly have gotten super cliquey and there's always someone who's hooking up with someone else or who's breaking up and then they get cast out of the group or they form a group with new people or whatever and it's honestly made it unpleasant to be around the club. I still show up and just do my runs but I basically have to go solo because I don't want to deal with the drama or talk about it and the people in my former clique are upset with me because I don't want to engage anymore.
This is way longer than I thought it would be but I just wanted to vent and figured Letsrun was a safe place because no one from my club probably even knows what this site is. If anyone has a solution though, I'm all ears because I used to go to this club three times a week for a track workout, group run, and a long run but now I do the track workout solo and skip the group run (that's the place where everyone "catches up" and I can't do it anymore). I still do long runs with the club but that's now where people from my former clique question why I'm not showing up anymore and I can actually feel how they're opinion of me is changing as I'm not part of the group anymore. Thanks for coming to my TedTalk!