FIVE THINGS ABOUT VANCOUVER’S ULTRAPLOGGER

1 SLOWING DOWN

A regular runner, David Papineau had to resort to walking after an injury this spring. Going slow gave him the time to smell the roses ... and the notso-rosy stuff on the streets. He started noticing how much trash there was and all the discarded masks, but kept walking. Then he noticed a friend’s young son collecting stuff off his street and decided to do the same on his daily rounds. “I live on a short street so it didn’t take long to do that,” he told the website Vancouver is

Awesome.

2 MANY MASKS

“Initially when I started seeing masks I thought ‘Who’s going to touch those?’ ” he said, explaining he was worried about getting COVID-19 from a mask. But “after a while, you start to get to the point where you’re comfortable with the idea of it.” He had changed dirty diapers, so he figured he could do this, too. Papineau picked up 30 or 40 masks on his first day. Less than two months in, this past long weekend he passed a milestone 5,000 total masks.

3 THE RIGHT TOOLS

As the injury healed and he began short runs, he even got to the point that he knew which type of bag was best to bring along to hold the detritus: bread bags. And that while you know a wet mask is heavier than a dry one, you don’t really know how much a bagful

of them will weigh. And with Vancouver’s rainy spring days, there were a lot of wet ones. On one run alone, he picked up 260 masks, two bread bags

full. Papineau went all out with tongs and gloves — and also elicited odd looks from passersby and even a tweet calling him “a local weirdo,” but

some thanks, too.

4 ULTRA-PLOGGER?

An ultra-marathoner, Papineau has run every street and laneway in the city at least once. The City of Vancouver told him that’s just over than 2,000 kilometres. When not out on group runs with his running club, what he does is called “plogging,” which conjoins the terms “plocka upp” (Swedish for “to pick up”) and jogging.

5 TRACKING THE TRASH

Papineau has not only counted the masks, he has made notes of where they were collected, on a spreadsheet. From it, he found some patterns. Some masks were near parking spots in residential areas, maybe dropped on purpose or by accident by drivers getting out of a car after parking at home. Some areas are worse, he told VIA: alongside parks, schools, bus stops, commercial areas and construction sites. Once, he says, he pulled around 30

from a storm drain near a grocery store on Fraser Street.

“Getting (masks) off the ground feels like an important step toward normal,” he said.