How I Got Into Speedcubing

My intense interest of Rubik's Cubes started my senior year of high school in 2002. I was a Math Aid for the Math Department, so I was usually found sitting in the math teacher's lounge. It was there that I saw Mr. Klezer playing with a standard 3x3x3 Rubik's Cube. I was amazed that he could solve it consistently, and I was surprised to learn that there was a method to the madness.

That evening I went to Walmart to check if the toy section had one. I found a few, and picked one up for $10. I went home that night, pulled the cube out of it's packaging, and started to read the little book that came with it. I became quickly confused by what it was trying to tell me to do, but I plugged away at it all night. By the end of the night, I had solved it once! I tried again quickly before calling it quits for the day, but got stuck again.

The next day I came home from school and hopped on the Internet. I did some searching and found speedcubing.com, which had some information from Chris Hardwick that I started to read over. I also found cubeland.free.fr, which is what I ultimately used as my method at the beginning. I spent the next 6 days just reading, twisting, and thinking about the various steps involved in the solution. Finally, on May 22, 2002, I was able to solve the Rubik's Cube without needing to look at any notes or algorithms. I made a text file (times.txt) with my first 3 solve times that night, which I actually still have a copy of. The contents of the file are:

5/22/02 - 10:15pm - 3:27
5/22/02 - 10:28pm - 5:09
5/22/02 - 10:33pm - 2:31

The next week at school, I told Mr. Klezer that I was able to solve the cube. He thought it was awesome, and invited me to participate in an informal competition he held every year for the students in his Advanced Calculus class. I agreed to go, but I was nervous because I wasn't sure how fast the other students were. When the competition day came, I found out that I was using a more efficient method than the other students. This allowed me to breeze through the competition, though Mr. Klezer tried to trip me up by giving me my cube last so I had less inspection time. After the competition, the other students wanted me to go head-to-head with Mr. Klezer. I was nervous about that, but I ended up victorious in that as well.