I found a hack in the system to beat rising gas prices...

I got out of work late last night so I had the opportunity to drive home on dark, desolate roads, with nothing special to focus on. So I started thinking about my blog. I thought back on my training and decided that a little practice resisting temptation wouldn't hurt. So I decided to play a little game with the rise and falls of the road before me.

I had learned from my mom many years ago that coasting could save me some gas money, and hadn't I just spent almost four hours at work stressing about how I didn't have enough money coming in?

So I started coasting, and here is where my fierce determination to keep this motivational streak alive and my addictive personality fall into perfect alignment with each other.

The entire drive home revolved around discovering the physics of my car, the idles between automatic transmission shifts, the sound of the engine revving, the shape of the road, the locality of curves and stop signs, etc...

And I learned a few things.

First off, cars are built to be able to maintain speed. If they were not, they would have no use to us.

As I began my coasting journey I experimented with different gallops, different inclines, long and short coasts, and I realized that on a flat, straight road, it would take my car 45 seconds to lose ten miles per hour. So I would cruise on flat surfaces and accelerate when I got to the bottom of the next hill.

Then I started thinking about how I could improve my coasts. I decided to pedal downhill to build up some speed and let my car do the rest so that I wasn't spending gas to maintain speed on an incline. Then I would pedal downhill again when I got to the next crest.

Small practicalities like coasting up to the next stop sign if there was no one behind me rather than hammering down just to put the brakes on half a second later, and using the weight of my car to slow down before turns also assisted me in expending less energy to achieve greater distance, just as it did as I threw rocks into the algae laden pond that morning.





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