I've played Touhou for about 16 months, starting around the beginning of December 2008. At least, that's when I started taking it seriously. The first time I played it was around August of that year, but I just tried it, went "that's neat", and forgot about it for a while. At this time, I had no shmup experience aside from being able to 8cc Ikaruga.
As for what got me into Touhou, I met
bjw on another forum/IRC channel, where I saw some of his Touhou videos and was completely blown away by things like a 1D1B SA Extra run and a 1D1B SA S6 run, which were holyfuckawesome. Early on in my career, I often referred to his videos as well as Kefit's and Fallen's for inspiration and to pick up on techniques.
Since I started in December, I started off in Touhou with a bang, playing it far too much over the course of school's winter break. I started off on Normal and worked my way up to Hard during the three-week break, and soon forced myself into Lunatic as a psychotic training program for Hard, pulling a fluke capture of VoWG within a month of playing. Within two months, I'd had all of the main windows games on Hard 1cc'd and scored my first Lunatic 1cc on MoF (7 deaths,
48 bombs, 5 spells captured!). It wasn't long until I had a handful of Lunatic 1ccs under my belt and I started going for perfect stage runs.
Toward the end of February (three months in if you don't feel like counting), I managed a 1DNB run of MoF Stage 6 (failed not VoWG, not SoR, but noncard 3...), and started grinding that. I quickly burned myself out though, and found myself on a two-month Touhou break. At some point, I started playing MegaMari, which brought me back to Touhou in time for the summer.
Since then, I've been playing fairly steadily, not too often but still enough to see myself through new accomplishments. Most of my goals at this point consist of getting perfect runs of assorted stages (PCB4, IN4B, SA4-Suika, UFO4, and SA5 come to mind, all of which have had 1DNB runs). Occasionally I'll try to pull a 1cc in a game with a new character, although that has somewhat stagnated because I'm usually too lazy to do full-game runs.
I should probably stop reminiscing and go to class now.