I was first red in my second year of high school, now I'm barely yellow. But this is not going to be a whining blog, you can just laugh at what I did.
A few weeks ago I thought: crap, I was $$$2400$$$ years ago, now my CF rating is pretty shit. I don't like the fact that the rest of my ICPC team has around average $$$2700$$$ rating, and I don't like the idea of posting a contest announcement as a non-red
. I've also noticed that there were 2 months before my wedding (24.09), so I set myself a challenge to retire before that date, as a red coder.
I started daily practice, took a few virtual contests and did daily upsolving around 2400-rated problems. I was really looking forward to catching up. But round #664 didn't really go as I wanted — I skipped B because C looked very nice, and then got stuck on the arising geometry. A minute before the end I thought: well, of course I'm not going to finish C in time. My previous (unrated) performances were consistently really good in Div2. Why not just fall and gain rating in Div2? It will be much quicker. So I resubmitted my beautiful problem A in 1:59.

So far, so good. I looked at CF-Predictor and thought: "I should be OK."