My left foot after the race. Photo by Matteo Penzo

On Sunday 21 March 2010 I participated in the Stramilano 10km race, the first official run using the Vibram FiveFingers shoes to simulate barefoot running. While I’ve been a FiveFingers user on-and-off for the last 3 or 4 years, I’ve only started running using them one monts ago and this race in Milan was the longest distance I’ve used them so far (10 km).

My reasons to use the FiveFingers are many but one of the most important ones is that since November 2009 I’ve been feeling acute knee pain while jogging for more than 2 km. As I’m constantly traveling, I haven’t been able to do an accurate medical check-up but it is planned in the short term. I’ve been practicing sports for several years and I’m not new to knee pain. The causes are multiple but it had never happened while doing light running. A secondary reason is that I’m a pure-heart geek and last Sunday I participated in the Stramilano together with my friends from the GeekRunning group.

My Vibram KSO FiveFingers with tune belt attached for the Nike+ sensor

The result was that I could finish the race at a regular pace with no pain. Now some of my leg muscles are a bit sore because I was not training often enough and because running with the FiveFingers stimulates different muscles that when using regular sport shoes. I aslo got some minor blisters on the internal side of my feet as I still have to completely “break” into the shoes.

Geek Runners after the Stramilano (photo from Matteo Penzo's flickr but not taken by him)

The model I currently use is the FiveFingers KSO combined with a “tune belt sensor pouch” (Amazon link) to hold the Nike+ sensor (Amazon link) I use to track my running (through the iPhone). I’m looking forward to running in them on a weekly basis and, why not, do some trekking too.

Side-effect of running in the Vibram FiveFingers: I got asked at least a dozen times how it was to jogg in them and if it was healthy for my feet.

I probably made all the mistakes listed in this article, pity I didn’t find it earlier.

More photos

My Vibram KSO FiveFingers with tune belt attached for the Nike+ sensor

Tune belt for Nike+ Sensor

Since I got my iPhone a couple of months ago, I noticed I started using much less my ubiquitous Moleskine notepad.

Maybe it’s because the iPhone is now more ubiquitous in my universe than the Moleskine. I used to carry it everywhere in my back pocket but now it stays mostly inside my backpack. I use the “mole” for several different things: I write thoughts and notes on trips, to-do lists and ideas I don’t want to forget. I keep some useful business and restaurant’s cards in it’s pocket and stick flight, transport and museum tickets plus other miscellaneous memorabilia to it’s pages. From time to time I also add a sticker and an instant photo to it. I used it to save concepts for future blog articles and business ideas.

Some of that stuff still goes to the Moleskine (imagine glueing a tram ticket to the iPhone) but most of the to-do lists and blog post ideas have been monopolized by Apple’s phone. With Gmail’s task manager I automatically sync to-do’s online, so that I have a unified list. With Wordpress’ App I can jot down blogpost drafts directly online. And if I want to keep track of a restaurant or other place I visited I can add it to my personal Google Maps.

Will I abandon paper for silicon chips? No way! I love writing and drawing with a ball pen on the silky pages. My thoughts are better framed better between the fake leather covers than inside “the cloud“. I like serendipitously browsing through old notes and be transported to past memories by travel tickets I’ve kept.

What does happen is that I consume my notepad much less… and I’m always eager in finishing one to start a brand new one, add stickers to it’s cover and copy useful information (Passport number, contact info, the code I use to tag different notes).

Just an irrelevant thought in a lazy Sunday in Amsterdam.

So finally almost 1 month ago I moved to Amsterdam to work in a very cool international event, PICNIC (more on my work in PICNIC on my blog dedicated to Conference Basics), that will take place next September 23 to 25.

The office is in the beautiful area of Jordaan, on the Herengracht canal. I also found a nice apartment near to Vondelpark and it takes me hardly 10 minutes on my beautifully decadent dutch bike to go from home to the office.

I’m loving Amsterdam so far. The city is a mix of a cosy fable town with a strong cosmopolitan attitude, framed by canals and a merchant atmosphere… all in a human scale that makes it easy to live in. The fact that the default transport is the bicycle adds to it’s peculiar mood. The temperature is just right during this summer season, not too warm but enough to wear a T-shirt (I’m not sure if I’d enjoy the city so much during winter but I might not be here anyway as this project lasts till mid-October). Rain is not yet an issue, though a light rain is a comon visitor.

Amsterdam looks like the right background for portrait photography, and I hope I’ll do enough of it in my scarce free time (want to model for me? send me an email!).

During the following weeks I’ll try to compile a short “weekend short” guide to Amsterdam, with the places I experience…  my moleskine and iPhone are crowded with notes from my moves here

Tomorrow I will officially get my Executive MBA degree at MIP-Politecnico di Milano… and my friend Eli the Best just sent me this cartoon by Dilbert

I read an interesting blogpost on Kevin Robert’s blog (KR is CEO Worldwide of Saatchi & Saatchi). He summarizes how technology has helped many families to stay together even if they are far away, to share feelings and emotions. To help keep in touch, be it through video-conference, audio, long (email) or short (sms) messages, real and asynchronous time. In a few words, it has made them more “sustainable”

It is often considered that technological innovations tend to separate the family because we’re usually told the stories that went wrong: the kid that committed suicide because his parents confiscated his Playstation, people without physical friends that rely only on who they meet online. We usually give for granted the “good” stories. Technology has empowered us in a world that has changed since our grandfather’s times. Of course the same tools won’t be useful or even necessary to everyone and they are by not means a guarantee for happiness. But in a lot of situations technology has acted as a medium to allow us to communicate or even to share our secrets, in many cases rapidly bringing down the age-barrier.

Facebook (mainly but also many other online social networks) has allowed me to stay in touch with old & new friends all over the world, and Twitter tells me what many of them are doing right now, the kind of small things you don’t call them for but make you happy to know. Through Flickr (and others, lately Facebook too) I share images from my trips and through my blog I express open some of my thoughts for discussion. Skype, and now Gtalk video, make videoconferencing and calling to virtual or physical phones an everyday activity. Emails and sms/mms are an extension of my voice and Youtube or Vimeo let me show some action. Dopplr shows me where my friends are traveling to and tells me when we have a coincident trip or they come to my city.

“Today I want to draw sustainability in another direction. Towards technology. No, not technologies that save energy or clean the environment, but familiar technologies we use everyday. Computers, email, phones and the rest have not only sped up my life, they have also hugely enriched my family life. For a start, it means we can retain close connections when we are scattered across the globe – Auckland, Rome, New York, London. I can catch up on the latest family snaps, talk with any of them wherever I am (and on video if I’ve access to the right gear), get the short version in texts and the long version on email, and of course, there’s YouTube and Skype. It means Ro can see Stella every day (well, three times a day actually!). We also have a family blog where we share what’s important to us without talking to the world.”

Read the full article here.

I don’t try to be an eco-hero but to test on myself if it is possible to severely minimize the use of certain disposable products. I live in Tokyo, a city which has a lot of eco-friendly habits but also some very nasty ones regarding the use of disposable materials like: chopsticks, plastic beverage bottles and plastic bags. Japan in general, and Tokyo in particular, is full of vending machines with the ones selling non-alcoholic drinks being the most ubiquitous of them all (according to the Japan Vending Machine Manufacturers Association an average 1 vending machine every 22 inhabitants!). It is very comfortable to be walking around and just grab a drink from one when you are thirsty, specially during the hot and humid summer months. You can find them: on the street, in the subways stations and train tracks, inside buildings and hotels, in shops and even on the mountains! They generate an immense amount of PET and other plastic bottles. Fortunately, Japanese people tend to be very clean and mindful about recycling, so probably a big part of them do not end in landfills, but anyway they are still mostly waste (I wonder how many of them end up as useful recycled products).

A similar thing happens with disposable (mostly wood or bamboo) chopsticks: once required for hygienic reasons, nowadays Japanese consume more than 25 billion chopsticks per year, 95% of them imported mainly from China and other Asiatic countries. It is a huge industry but it’s becoming unsustainable for a world that is getting “hot, flat and crowded” (Tom Friedman dixit). A similar problem occurs in China, where more than 45 billion are consumed each year. It is not only about the waste produced by these tons of chopsticks but also the fact that with actual population growth rates and consumption, there is not enough bamboo to produce them and we are depleting bamboo forests at a higher rate that the time needed to regenerate them.

And what about plastic bags? Japanese are maniacs regarding packaging, in particular of food. While it might be a nice thing for presents, it is more often ridiculous to have something packed in 3 stratus of plastic, paper, etc. Even when you buy a bar of chocolate the salesman will try to put it inside a plastic bag.

I believe that in most situations the use of these products (one-use plastic bottles, chopsticks and plastic bags) can be avoided and we could make a positive impact on the environment. I understand that some industries will suffer but I also think that when a constraint is applied, a full array of new opportunities can bloom.

The solution I am testing on myself, to fully understand the implications, is to carry my own reusable chopsticks, an eco-bag that fits in my pocket and a plastic bottle that I can refill with tap water. These should apply for at least 70-80% of my everyday situations. There will be times that I won’t be able to avoid the use of these kind of disposable products, but I hope those to be the exceptions instead of the norm. And if I get a plastic bag to carry something, I will use it for my home’s garbage. If I want to buy a beverage apart from tap water, say a sports drink, I’ll buy a huge 2 liter bottle at the supermarket and refill my carry-on bottle.

I found the tools for this experiment, portable chopsticks, 500ml drink bottle and eco-bag, at (yes, you guessed right!) Muji, one of my fav stores. These guys usually sell very “environmentally conscious” products.

Most restaurants that serve their food in ceramic (or non disposable) must do the washing somehow, be it manually or in a dishwasher. Why not offer reusable chopsticks or cutlery and was them too? It is said that Japanese people don’t want to use chopsticks used by others, so they should carry their own. As a matter of fact, there’s a movement called “bring your own chopsticks” though in my everyday life I haven’t seen much people doing it. More on the “My-Hashi” movement here.

What would happen if everyone adopted a similar attitude?

How many trees would be saved?

How much garbage would never be produced?

How much less oil  (for making plastic produts) could we consume?

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