So last month I hadn’t made any progress towards my goal of cutting down on the number of miles I put on my car. My average for the month was about exactly what it had been the year before, so I put a little extra burden on myself this past month to exceed my original goal of cutting out 10% per month. So how did I do? Quite well actually. With a caveat.

First of all, my mileage. From Jan. 13 – Feb. 12 I put on just 426 miles. A drop of 136 miles from the previous month, for a whopping 24% decrease last month, and a 22.5% decrease from my average of 550 miles/month. Awesome.

However, there’s a bit of the bad to go with the good in there. A part of the reason I was able to cut my miles so severly is that I was out of town on business four four days. Not being able to drive your car sure makes it a lot easier to not drive your car. Of course, on the flip side, the next week we had not just bad weather, but horrible weather. We were hit with 11″ of snow here in the D/FW area (about 8-9″ at the house) and for days the roads were either snowy/slushy, or covered with ice as the snow slowly melted during the day and refroze at night. I simple do not have a bike that is set up to ride safely in those conditions, so I left it at home and drove in to work for five straight workdays. That right there is about 75 miles that were unexpectedly added back into my total.

Finally, I started out the current month with a bit more driving than I would have liked, thanks mainly to poor shopping list planning and a sick girlfriend who needed me to run out for supplies (doesn’t she know she’s supposed to schedule her illnesses?), as well as an unnecessary driving commute that I did, simply because I didn’t prepare the night before and was too tired to get motivated in the morning. One of those conditions is survivable, two are not.

Anyway… with the weather appearing to start climbing out of the depths of witer suckitude and into something a bit less bone-chilling, I ought to be able to get a lot more riding in in the coming weeks. I just need to make sure my rain gear is ready to go.