My dog Birdie is a skilled plogger. She is a jumpy, highly untrained Golden Doodle who has enough frenetic energy to power our house for six hours straight whenever a treefall knocks down the NYSEG lines in a windstorm. She may seem a ditzy dunderhead, but she is actually smart as a whip. On every morning and evening walk we take, she immediately recognizes when something is out of place. She will freeze in a point, then make a beeline for any piece of trash, like a soda can or crumpled paper bag, that doesn’t belong.
Plastic water bottles, along with dead moles, are her favorite prizes to snag from the side of the road and carry home in her chompers.
Derived from the Swedish phrase plocka upp, meaning “pick up” just like it sounds, plogging is the name for the simple activity of picking up whatever roadside trash you find on a jog, walk, or bike ride. Plogging was invented in Sweden in 2016, though I’m sure community-oriented runners and walkers (and dogs) have been doing it forever.
When I go out for a jog, I like to carry a little plastic shopping bag in my pocket, in case the opportunity for some light plogging presents itself. Beer bottles, coffee cups, foil takeout containers are typical treasures I find. Often, I’m stuffing tattered plastic shopping bags into my plastic shopping bag, the absurdity of which gives me a ridiculous amount of pleasure.
For the ultimate green twist, I am able to recycle everything I’ve found when I get home, sticking my empty plastic bag back in my pocket for reuse.
But getting rid of trash while I run is not just something involving physical garbage.
“Junk miles” is a controversial subject among hardcore road and trail runners, a pejorative term used by some for supposedly excessive training miles that are run at a very easy pace and don’t make any clear and specific contribution to overall fitness. Yet others embrace long, super-slow distance as a key building block for endurance and aerobic fitness in all phases of training.
I prefer to think about “junk runs” rather than “junk miles.” For instance, my favorite weekday workout is a three-mile run. Usually it’s a flat out-and-back and I will plonk along like a slo-mo metronome, clicking off the miles at an easy pace, finishing with a clear head and just enough of a sweat that I can justify hitting the shower before I get back to my day.
The problem is, it’s too much of the same thing, over and over, and that’s what makes it junky. Variety is the missing ingredient, not just in distance but in pace and effort.
Yesterday, I turned my usual three-mile junker into something much more valuable. All I did was change up the pace.
First half mile, super easy warm up. Next half mile, pick up the pace and power up a 200-foot local hill so I’m huffing and puffing. But at the top, instead of letting off the gas, I sped up to about 70% effort for the next half-mile, then kept this spicy pace up after the turnaround for another half-mile until I was back at the top of the hill. Then it was a drastic slow-down to cool off and enjoy the final mile.
To make things even less junky, I did a little plonking on the way back with my handy pocket plastic bag.
A cache of fast-food wrappers, a torn-up work glove, and best of all, a plastic Hal’s seltzer water bottle, which I proudly presented to Birdie when I got home.
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