While many people spend their runs listening to music or enjoying the scenery, John Smith tries to spend his picking up trash.
As a proud plogger and family man, Smith runs around Grove City with a messenger bag strapped across his chest and a trash picker in hand helping to beautify his community one piece of trash at a time.
Plogging in the park
Though you may be familiar with vlogging and blogging, plogging is an environmental term that describes the act of people combining their daily jog with picking up litter. Smith started his plogging journey in Ocean View, Virginia.
“We lived in Ocean View, which is a part of Norfolk, and there’s a lot of trash out there. And, you know, running to me is just boring on its own, right? So, I was thinking of anything I could to make it better,” Smith says. “And I thought I could pick up trash while I was running and then I might be able to do something for the community and run at the same time.”
John Smith picking up trash
Smith found a love for running while serving as a nuclear machinist mate in the Navy. He spent almost 10 years controlling the water chemistry on the reactor plants of aircraft carriers before joining the U.S. Navy Reserves in 2019.
“[Physical fitness tests] were one of my favorite parts about being in the military, honestly. Every six months I got to see how far I’ve come along as far as my running went. A lot of people didn’t enjoy that, as you can imagine, but I liked it,” Smith says.
Early on, Smith found that running could get tedious and boring. Music just wasn’t cutting it anymore. As a man who loves to serve his community, he took to cleaning up the streets during his daily exercise.
He found a gardening bag lying around his house and purchased a trash picker, grabbing stray items off of the side of the road and posting his hauls of litter on Instagram.
“It gives you a way that you can do community service on your own schedule,” Smith says. “We keep ourselves so busy that volunteering with the community, or community service in general is not something that everyone has time for. But, if you have time to go for a run or a walk, you could try it out.”
Reduce-Recycle-Rerun
“I’m not a big social media person, other than posting my runs to give me a way to track my progress. I post a picture with my time, my distance, and my pace, and then you can get an idea of how much trash I picked up by the picture,” Smith says.
While some ploggers weigh their trash per run, Smith takes a hands-on approach and sorts out his trash after every run, categorizing it by material type and frequency.
John Smith running
He tries his best to make his posts informative by raising awareness for the frequency of discarded trash that fills Grove City.
To grow awareness, Smith started a Facebook group in 2019 called Reduce-Recycle-Rerun (RRRerun), sharing the same name as his own personal Instagram account, to gather the interest of fellow runners.
“I thought, ‘If I start a Facebook group, maybe other people would see it and maybe they might be inspired to get out and do something on their own,’” Smith says. “Reduce, recycle, rerun. Reduce the amount of trash on the ground, recycle what you pick up, and rerun just means do it again.”
Including members from John’s old home of Norfolk and familiar Grove City faces, the group shares posts from personal plogging ventures to infographics about local community cleanups. They also don’t shy away from sharing running memes and commenting encouraging thoughts on each other’s posts.
The contributions of the RRRerun members help impact their own health as well as their community’s. Smith’s main goal is to inspire other people to get outside, get moving in whatever way they can, and get involved in cleaning up their city.
Family matters
Having spent so many years in active duty in the military, Smith was ready to settle into a calmer life with his family. Since taking on his current role as a transmission system operator at American Electric Power, Smith has finally started to master the work-life-running balance.
“(My kids) take up pretty much any time outside of work,” he says. “I do a lot of running with my seven-year-old, and sometimes with my two-year-old if I want to push a stroller. That gives me something to do where I can take care of myself and I can spend time with them.”
Smith and his wife, Shevelle, have two children, Foster, age seven, and Gatlin, age two. As a family, they enjoy spending as much time together and outside as possible. Frequenters of the Lake Logan campgrounds, the Smith family loves camping and fishing together.
The Smiths
When the family is closer to home, Smith does what he can to stay active and involved in his family. After work, he unwinds with a daily run.
“Foster pulls a trailer on his bicycle, so I’ll run and put the trash in the trailer as he’s riding in front of me. And that’s some of our quality time,” Smith says. “There are ponds all over Grove City, and he’s an outdoor nut, so we’ll stop and he’ll dig snails out of the pond during our run. And I mean, I love that about running, that it’s something I can share with him.”
Smith jokes that his son loves resource games like Minecraft, which have since influenced him to collect his own resources. Foster has created his very own scrap metal collection from some of the litter he and his father collect, similar to his resourcefulness while playing video games.
“You know, I could come home and we could sit in front of the TV together, or I could watch him play video games, but it’s just way better when we can get out and do something together,” Smith says. “When you tie everything together, it’s a lot of impact. You know, in my life and his life, and in the community also. It’s one of the best things about it.”
Mary Nader is a contributing writer at CityScene Media Group. Feedback welcome at mnader@cityscenemediagroup.com.
