It started with a card and a lie...

I came to Hong Kong from Singapore in the summer of 2004 and was struggling to find enough riding buddies to get me out of bed in the mornings. I was inspired by my club in Singapore, ANZA Cycling, so I simply stole their concept. Said and done, on November 7^th 2004 the SIRCYCLING Yahoo group was born and you could argue, so was South Island Road Cycling. 

This was a few years before Facebook was publicly available, so Yahoo was actually state of the art. I was living in Tai Tam at the time, so the choice of starting time and meeting place was simply picked to ensure that I could get to the Peak and back home in time for a shower before heading to work. None of the food venues in Shek-O served anything resembling coffee at the time, so the coffee stop in the early years was at Pacific Coffee in Stanley, also incidentally very convenient for anyone living in Tai Tam.

So, I had a website, a meeting point, a coffee shop, but no buddies. Well that was not entirely true, I sometimes rode with Chris McLeod, but he was training hard for his Ironman races and could not devote as much time to road cycling as I wanted. I found a small printing shop in Taikoo who helped me to print a few hundred cards with basic information about the group and the link to the Yahoo Group. I put a stack of cards in a small bento box on my toptube. Over the next few months I did a lot of interval training. As soon as I saw a cyclist, I would race to catch him and then hand over a card.