I wasn’t suggesting that you “remove the timer section”.
Have you done what I suggested to verify that when you see a ping time in your serial monitor the void loop is executing, and enabling timestamps?
Yes, you could use Blynk.config(), but the only way that will help is to display readings in the serial monitor even if the device can’t connect to Blynk.
Here’s an example of using Blynk.config()…
But you’d need to change the default connection timeout, and prevent Blynk.run() from executing if Blynk.connected() is false. An example and discussion is here….