How I Got Into Speedrunning

So this story is going to combine two different things, so it might be a bit hard to follow, so I'll try my best.

Sometime around May/June 2013, a few people I knew from another site created a Skype group and I was added into it.  At first there were only a few of us there but we talked about all kinds of stuff.  We probably sent about 5000 messages per day, easily.  We all had played games together on an old site that's dead now, and one of the games we played was a rhythm game.  Soon enough, they got me into playing osu!.  For most of that summer, we would have group calls and play multiplayer almost every day for 3-4 hours at least.  Slowly more and more people we got to play were added into the group as well.  It was really fun while it lasted.

After that summer ended though, the group gradually died out, and most of the people in the group stopped playing.  We would never have any group calls and even the chat slowly died down.  I really only kept talking to 3 or 4 people from the group, and those were the ones who were either still playing osu! or were playing another rhythm game on a site we had partially migrated to.  To make a long story short, eventually I got mad at some people and separated myself from the group entirely, only keeping in contact with two of the people from the original group.

Jumping back in time a bit, somewhere around March 2013 I also discovered Pokemon speedrunning for the first time.  While browsing YouTube, I came across Werster's run from AGDQ 2013.  I was amazed by it, and started watching all of his highlights on YouTube and tuned into some of his Twitch streams to watch him reset for hours.  Later I found some other speedrunners I enjoyed watching, namely MBM and Gunner.  After watching a lot of those three, I decided to try doing some speedruns on my Game Boy Pocket during one of my boring lectures, and later did a few streams over on Justin.tv (because I had an account there that I couldn't move to Twitch).  I had several friends that I would get to watch, and even though they weren't very interested, it was very fun to do.

While speedrunning was fun, it was never something I could see myself doing long-term.  I finally made a Twitch account in August, and did occasional streams like once or twice a month, with mostly casual stuff and the rare speedrun and glitch exhibition.  I still had a few friends who I could get to come watch so it was still interesting to do.

In February of 2014, I decided to do a Crystal glitchless speedrun offline.  The time was miserable and I had no idea what I was doing, and I never really had the motivation to continue to improve it.  I did the same thing with Gold Any% when the coin case route was found; I got a time around 59 minutes and stopped.

Jumping ahead again to the summer of 2014, our little Skype group had a small revival.  This included me, the two people I kept in contact with from before, and two other people who we got along with and were pretty fun to talk with.  For several weeks we would have daily Skype calls that would last for several hours.  One of the newer people in the group would often be streaming osu! or Minecraft on Twitch during the calls, so we would hang out there and watch him as well.  During this, I got the idea to try and play Crystal again, doing some speedrun attempts on Twitch.

You can see some of my super early highlights if you go back far enough on my profile page.  (http://www.twitch.tv/deconstream/c/4646383 is an example that features the people in the call.)  I was still an extremely bad runner though, and the only people I ever had in my chat were the people I was talking with at the time.  Whenever I got a random viewer popping in my stream, I got so excited.  My PB at the time was a 3:56, which didn't seem like that bad of a time to me.  I still didn't have that much serious interest in competing for good times though.

For whatever reason though, one night I started getting pretty angry with someone in our group.  We had a pretty big argument over pointless stuff, and I feel that he was being extremely irrational.  I was close with him up to this point, but this basically tore us apart, and I retaliated by blocking him everywhere because I didn't want to talk to him again.  I haven't spoken to him since.  Basically I had to leave our group as well since I couldn't tolerate him even though I still liked everyone else in the group.

The worst part is that the four remaining people in the group continued to have their daily 8 hour calls without me.  By stopping talking to one person, I lost everything and was unable to talk to anyone that I wanted to anymore.  I grew quite lonely because I felt like I was being ignored and that nobody cared about me anymore.  One person in the group in particular, I kept trying to beg to go on a Skype call with me instead just because I needed someone to talk to.  They didn't refuse, but I kept asking "Are you done yet?", "How much longer will you be?", and similar things.  When minutes, sometimes hours, would pass without any response, it just made me feel terrible inside.

Something else happened between me and this person that I would prefer not to discuss, but it basically made them not want to talk to me.  I don't know if these things are related, but the fact that I never got a definitive explanation, or even a "No, I don't want to talk to you" made me keep trying, probably more than I should have.  And it only made me get hurt more and more when I was ignored night after night.  Eventually I just said to them, "We can't be friends anymore, because whenever I think about you I just keep getting hurt".  And after a few more days, we finally agreed to never talk to each other because that would make it easier and make me not have to depend on them any more.

But it still hurt a lot, because I had lost the person who had been closest to me for the past year.  It was hard for me to keep them out of my mind, and whenever I had thoughts of them I would almost start to break down.  I also had nobody to talk to at the time.  I never was very good at starting conversations or making friends either, so I usually only had one or two people at most that I could discuss important stuff with.

I had two goals.  Get these thoughts off my mind by finding something else to replace them with, and finding some nice people to talk to.  It turns out that a solution that solved both problems was speedrunning.  There was a period of 4-5 days when I was in Gunner's chat 24/7 when I wasn't streaming myself.  I would literally sleep with his stream open and wake up when I heard the stream come online.  It helped me get through some pretty tough times.  And since I had also gained a few regular viewers for my Crystal runs, I enjoyed streaming as well.

Once I actually put more of my focus into doing runs, I realized just how bad my old times were.  I had a really nice run just a few days after this event.  I got a PB by 18 minutes where I peaked at 38 viewers and got some help from Fract to make me not quite as bad at the game.  Two days later, I saved another 9 minutes for a 3:29, which I still consider a good time with the older route.  I had always wanted to learn Yellow as another game, and Fract invited me to join a Yellow race with Gunner, so I accepted and went in without knowing the route and managed to finish.

Less than a week later, I got a 2:05 in Yellow, and soon after, a 2:02.  There always seemed to be potential for improvement, so I kept coming back.  Then BTW was discovered and Blue NSC happened, and I managed to get WR twice during the first surge of runs with the original route.  Speedrunning had become fun, and there was always good competition to keep me motivated to improve my times.  There were always good runners to watch, and there were often races for even more of a challenge and more competition.  It was like a dream.

While I can't say I would want to go through all of the pain I had to endure before my decision to take speedrunning seriously, it is definitely something I truly love, and don't see myself ever stopping.  I love each and every person I've met through speedrunning, and hope to continue meeting more and more people in the future!