Daily Dabble and Benefits of Mindful Driving

The old truck that was totaled - kayaking trip to Brushy Creek lake.

Today was a bit chilly but I bundled up to walk Penny for an invigorating 25 minute walk. Afterwards I hit the KB for the 16 session strength workout. There are two things I switch to dumbbells for, the overhead press and curls. I do not have the strength for either of those with the 30 lb KB. However, the heaviest dumbbell I have is only 10 lbs and that is not enough for either press, curls, or Turkish Get Ups. So if I get some time this week I'll head over to Academy to pick up a 15 or 20 lb dumbbell. To choose which, I'll heft them both and take the one I can barely manage. That's how I chose the KB weight too.

I drive a Nissan Frontier pickup. It's a mid-sized six cylinder vehicle that allows me to transport the stuff I need for our ranch and my woodworking hobby and kayaks yet it's not so big to have miserable gas mileage. The one I drive now is the 2nd of the same model as the first was totaled by a woman who T-boned my truck when she ran a red light. The old one was an upscale version that had a built-in MPG display which showed that I typically averaged 16.5 MPG. The replacement Frontier didn't have the MPG display so I put a small notebook in my truck and kept track of the mileage and fuel consumption manually and the newer truck still averaged 16.5 MPG.

After a few months I decided to try to see if driving in a different manner would have an impact to the MPG. So instead of my usual head snapping rabbit take-offs from stops, I consciously made every effort to veerrrry sloooowly accelerate from every stop and not punch the gas for any reason. My driving schedule and destinations are very consistent day-to-day and week-to-week which allowed for a reasonable comparison to the prior MPG results. Although I observed that my slow starts aggravated a lot of folks behind me, I found that my average fuel consumption jumped to over 20 MPG. That was almost a 22% improvement simply by going turtle.

It takes a great deal of conscious effort to maintain that style of driving because during normal daily commute driving one tends to follow the herd that is usually leaping off every red-to-green light change. (I find it funny to see so many of the Prius's that appear to drag race everywhere - there's no way their driving style will result in the vaunted 40+ MPG with such heavy-foot driving.) I therefore postulate that turtle take-off driving qualifies as mindful driving.

Today I'm back to mindless driving but I exercise a lot more restraint and don't jack-rabbit off the start like I used to. Along the way I also changed my methodology of tracking fuel consumption by downloading an android app that keeps the statistics as I enter the data at every fill-up. Currently, with my somewhere between turtle and rabbit acceleration habits my average fuel consumption is 17.95 MPG. However, if the price of gasoline continues climbing to back over $4 per gallon, I'll switch back to mindful turtle mode.