In 2005 we had a hurricane that knocked out electricity in my town for 2 weeks. During that time, no one had gasoline either. And there was a dawn/dusk curfew.
Life was boring. In order to have anything to do once the sun went down at night, I bought a $50 used schwinn from the 70's and just puttered around town on completely empty roads.
A 6 months later, one of my friends who was into cycling convinced me to get a decent single speed to commute to and from work, which I did. Going from an ancient crappy schwinn to a new single speed road bike was amazing. My rides went from being 10 mile rides at 14mph to 25 mile rides at 18mph. I became addicted to the exercise and the speed.
Shortly after that, I started following professional cycling on TV and I got inspired to try racing. I bought a TT bike (I was in love with the technology and the fact that it was the absolute fastest bike speeds I could achieve solo) and did my first couple of races in 2008. I was slow and horrible.
I kept riding but on a TT bike it's hard to get the type of base mileage in you need to be competitive as a racer. I bought a used road bike from craigslist and my cycling took off. I went from going 250 miles a month of training to 500. As you can expect I got a lot faster. In 2009 I made huge efforts to train, and I got my first podium as a racer. I kept up my ~500 mile a month training for a while but I plateaued. In 2010 I rededicated myself. I now average around 700-800 miles a month with lot's of structured interval training, and I eat right. I haven't had fast food of any sort since August 2010 and my results have been excellent. Since my first race in 2008, it's been about 3 years and my performance continues to improve.
The funny thing about all of this, is that none of it was planned. When I bought that first beater schwinn, I never planned on buying a real road bike. It was simply to kill time since we had no electricity. When I bought the single speed I mocked the idea of ever wearing lycra and racing. When I bought my TT bike, I did it for speed not to race. I raced on a lark, and enjoyed it. I bought my road bike not because I consciously wanted to ride more miles and do longer rides or do road races/crits, but simply because the craigslist deal was too good to pass up.
Even after I got my road bike, I only really committed to racing and training hard by accident. I was riding solo one day when the local fast group ride overtook me and I caught onto the back of the pack and held on as long as I could as they geared up for the final sprint. I would say getting dropped that day was the turning point. From then on, I knew what I wanted to do and what I wanted to be.
And now I am doing what I want to do and I am what I want to be.