Concept of my "Do I still like....?" blogs

It was a sudden idea. I guess I was not thinking about road cycling but suddenly the idea was there in a form of a question (just to prove that all my ideas are basically linguistic dilemmas): 

Do I still like Tour de France?

I knew instantly that this could be a solution of my dilemma hunting me for years that I should find a unique perspective to create content about modern day cycling. 

To be honest, I was searching for an idea since a few years. All of them came from real experience and real feelings towards professional road cycling competitions. 

Since I wrote my book about the (then) current issues of the world of road cycling in 2017 (actually, I was writing it mostly during 2016, but published it in 2017), I just couldn't find my place. Even switching to English  from Hungarian, my mother tongue and starting sharing content to a much wider audience did not helped. 

While I was content about my even deeper research of road cycling history, I was watching less and less present events. 

Then in 2024, I thought it would be a great idea to "sell the story" in a form of a special project something about like "last year I lost touch with the current events but now I am here to catch up with the latest, please follow my journey".  I felt already at the beginning it won't be the winning idea. 

A year later I was so sure about giving up watching, and also writing about the latest events, that I created the "my last cycling season" project. Also failed. 

The core of the problem was that in both cases I had to adjust myself to the time schedules of the competitions. And no matter of how precise my preparation was, suddenly, as, for  example, the Tour de France started in July, I felt I have something more important to do, it would be stupid waste of time to stick to this event for three weeks. What was natural for many many years (I created my first road cycling related blog in 2009), spending July with watching Tour de France, became rather an unbearably big and heavy burden. 

During the autumn months of last year, I was thinking a lot about how can I create an online project about current road cycling races during a completely different part of the year when they are actually held. It's not like watching a tv series month or even years after it was originally released. A road cycling competition is really that kind of event gets almost entirely attention when it's happening. 

Thinking about this dilemma intertwined with some brand new blog ideas about not blogging about certain topics (like food history, the history of gardening, the Industrial Revolution or  the globalisation before our modern times, etc), but blogging about how I, a real human being approach those topics. No more short, plain, but informative posts, rather long monologues about why I like that topic, what I was always excited particularly about, etc. 

Not about certain topics but rather about real human experience of being curious and learning. 

Because I had the strange feeling that this idea requires writing skills I possess only on my mother language, I decided to write these new experimental blogs in Hungarian. Even my original Hungarian written road cycling blog I started re-writing in this sense. 

But still my dilemma about my English written road cycling blogs I couldn't come over. 

Untill the moment when the question Do I still like Tour de France? just popped up. 

I felt it. I felt the vibe. I felt the different approach with a tiny little sprinkle of provocation. 

I immediately had several post ideas, started create the project when I realised, this approach would fit even better my relation to the spring classics. I skipped most of them although there was a time I liked them better than the big grandious grand tours. Now I struggle to watch them. Gardening seems always a more pleasant option for  sunny spring Sunday afternoons. 

Anyway, here I am with my special project (I guess, it will be a short time project) talking about how I loved one-day races once, and why I don't watch them anymore. 

The third member of this group of my new experimental projects is Do I still like America? roots in a different dilemma and related to my original profession: analising fictional stories set in the past. In this case  (fictional) stories set in the past of the US. 

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