This site is important to me, but I’m not entirely sure what it wants to be when it grows up. A lifetime of personal projects, fifteen years in business, and living several kinds of “lives” has taught me that things rarely end up where I expect.

On a scale of 1 to 10, my qualifications to offer commentary on pro cycling sport are -5. Meanwhile, there are enough cycling gadget reviews out there, and plenty of quality training content (plugging my coaches’ group, of course). Actually, I’m sure I’ll touch on training in passing; I do a lot of formal training, and in particular, I enjoy making training accessible to more casual cyclists and watching things click, as my cycling mentors did for me. Still, any sustained focus on that sort of thing would be–coming from me–as unsophisticated as it would be redundant.

I’m more interested in how a passion for cycling as a sport–a passion intense enough to become a primary personal quality, a readily apparent surface feature–interacts with the rest of life, work, relationships, and identity. Cycling has changed many lives, including mine, quite radically and generally for the better. Something about it is uniquely consuming. However, it’s also a greedy and jealous god. I don’t think many serious cyclists would disagree if I said that it’s not just a hobby, but a lifestyle. There’s a lot to explore about how this lifestyle is braided with one’s energy and creativity in other areas, and the trade-offs involved. Broader, more outward observations about the sociology of cycling occupy my mind as well.

Cycling is very far from the only thing I care about, but it is very life-altering. That means that some days I feel like a cyclist looking out at the world through that prism, while other days I feel like a tourist gazing back into cycling from the outside, wide-eyed and bewildered. I sheepishly tip-toe toward the idea that there is an interesting vantage point in this tension, though I’m very conscious of my hypocrisy: I get annoyed when other people say that these or those conditions offer something like an “interesting vantage point” without explaining what’s so interesting. But I’m just not sure yet.

Really, I see this site to be an evolution of my old personal blog, Likewise.am. “Likewise a Blog” had its moments and some parts live on. I put a lot of work into that blog over the years. Sometime in early 2022, the DNS domain lapsed, the payment processor wouldn’t take my card, and the registrar company was unresponsive about the issue. I could have fought these entropic forces through fresh inputs of energy, and a few loyal readers said I should have. Instead, I took it as a sign from the universe that it was time to let it go. It’s not that I think “everything happens for a reason”; actually, I think that’s a lazy, garbage platitude. However, getting older has granted me more serenity to accept the opposite, that many things just happen for no good reason at all. But, if we’re lucky, we might even have a sense of humour about it. Something kind of Vonnegutian.

All the same, if we tried to shake a non-capricious explanation out of the trees, it would be this: “Likewise a Blog” was an echo of my globetrotting persona, from the foreign top-level domain, right down to the humourous origins of its namesake¹ in the stilted English of an Armenian news site. Alas, I’m not a traveller anymore; I’m a cyclist now. (If you find this conceptual transition laboured, you’re in good company; me too. Will I next be reincarnated as a marmoset, or perhaps a bartender? Or maybe the captain of a Syrian minesweeper? Stay tuned!)

I’d be remiss not to add that writing is therapeutic. Few things are more gratifying and humbling than to have readers, but I need this, too. Always have.

¹ _{Back in 2012, The tendency of English-language copy at news.am to over-use the word “likewise”, in place of “also” and other synonyms, was so lampooned by me that it became a genre of humour with my Armenian tech friends:}