It's quite a bizarre sensation to read back through one's 'coming of age' blog posts. This stormy October evening I spun up blogspot and felt like I had opened the padlock to my old diary, my quite vanilla 'Catcher in the Rye' years, adapted to cyclists. While I don't consider myself a particularly public person, I was amazed by the consistent documentation of my thoughts and feelings through the major parts of my life at the time; 71 articles between July 2008 and June 2011 no less. Damn I was a disciplined teenager.
I can't recollect when, but I made this blog and the partner bike-fit blog private at some point after 2012, presumably out of potential embarrassment of being a complete and utter saddo at University. In hindsight I can see the chances of an interested girl deciding that the blog was the final straw, after she had suffered through chat about aerospace engineering and cycling, was slim. Maybe I had been embarrassed about the lack of mention of any love interests. Who knows.. these are the growing pains of a socially awkward cyclist from an all-boy's school. I just desperately hope I didn't make them private after University for fear of my potential corporate employers seeing it and deciding I wasn't the 'right' fit. That would be far more depressing. As if my former employer (-insert failing investment bank-) could really give two hoots, but in those days the recruiters made you feel like you needed to fit a certain mould.
While scrolling through old posts it was quite sad to see all my carefully selected pictures of myself had been deleted off the blogspot server. Scrawny Sandy scrawny in Spain, oh look there is one in the Alps.. maybe they decided it was just too much vanity for one blog to take... these racing cyclists can be quite a vain and self centred bunch, and I was no exception. I then checked who was still a faithful follower of the blog and was snapped out of my sadness, ego inflating to 200 psi. On the list was none other than one Tao Geoghegan Hart, former winner of the Giro d'Italia and one of the cycling intelligentia! I was a bit hacked off when I checked which other blogs he was following and found a non-exclusive, C-list selection of former riders including my good friend David Nichols. Don't you worry though Tao, I'll make your follow worth it.
I logged in to blogspot as I miss writing. Without realising it, during those 3 years the blog was quite the therapy tool for sounding off my inane ideas and coping with often solitary periods. Since then my life has become a whole lot more well rounded with university, friends, work, a fantastic wife, and I haven't needed to fill 10 hour voids between finishing my training ride and falling asleep. But recently the desire to write has returned in ebbs. I started trying to write novel, but like 9 out of 10 of every aspiring lockdown author got far too busy and distracted so that is still a WIP project. I think/hope a blog is a fantastic compromise to get started; public enough to incentivise decent writing (private journals are always a struggle- why write well for no one to read?), but short enough for my current state of concentration. For better or for worse I won't be blogging about just cycling, but anything I feel like, as I like to think my horizons have expanded somewhat over the last 11 years.
With that, welcome to the official rebrand and relaunch of sandykingcycling.blogspot.com, now called the more generic: grainofsand1.blogspot.com* !
* Not to be confused with grainofsand.blogspot.com. It appears some Paraguayan language student nonchalantly stole this fantastic url in 2011 and hasn't relinquished it since, forever cursing us with disconnected english that could have come from a random word generator.
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