1 November 2021 | by Darren Evans
Hello, my name is Darren and I’m a keen runner. I mainly run trails around Sussex.
Whilst running around our beautiful surrounding areas, I realised how bad the litter problem is. In 2019 my wife Jane, my son Alfie and I started Plogging (picking litter whilst jogging).
We did it primarily for family exercise but then started doing it with groups of friends.
When Covid hit we were again restricted to family plogs.
It was then that I got involved with Trees Not Tees which allows runners to sign up to plant a tree instead of getting a Tee shirt at the end of a race. I started running in races that only offered the Treesnottees option, however I soon realised that it was the races that didn’t offer the option that I needed to enter, to then challenge the Race Directors as to why they didn’t offer the tree planting option.
Millions of race t-shirts are produced every year.
The environmental cost of making a t-shirt is huge. It takes the same amount of water that a person drinks in 2.5 years to make a single cotton t-shirt, plus over 2kg of eCO2.
Last year I took early retirement to focus on this and it has now become my main passion.
I am now a regional collector for www.rerunclothing.org who help re-purpose old running kit especially race T-shirts.
When I retired from my corporate job last year I found that I had the capacity to write Odes and have had a couple published. A few weeks ago I wrote an Ode called ‘A runners Ode to Climate Change’. I shared it with a couple of my new friends within the ultra running community and they wanted to get involved in helping me bring it to life.
Here is the link to my video Ode.
I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I did writing it and putting it together.
‘A runners Ode to Climate Change’.