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[Editor's Note:  On nice days, our intern, Nebraska native Kelsey Hutch, rides to work on her longboard.  We were so impressed with her skills, we asked her to write about how she learned to board.  This is her story.]

Some of my best ideas occur when I’m first waking up.  Ideas like, “Carving down paved hills at 40 mph on a piece of 44″ wood and four rubber wheels sounds pretty safe!”  (As you can imagine, my mum usually doesn’t agree with the words “best ideas.”)

My last genius endeavor was to pick up the sport of longboarding.

I wish I could say I learned coasting the hills of California or hillbombing (riding your board down a hill as fast as possible) in Washington State. But being from the Nebraska suburbs, my landscape options were limited, and fellow longboarders to show me the ropes were in short supply.

Instead, I turned to the all-knowing website, YouTube, which had fuzzy home videos of amateur boys riding around on their boards and yelling information to the person holding the camera. I hate to compare boarding to the cliche term, “It’s like riding a bike” but it is – you can’t take notes on how to longboard, you just have to get out there and practice until you get it right.  Learning to ride is a self-learned activity, and practice is the only way to success.  Which leads to the major con of the sport:

You will fall.  Not “probably” or “maybe” – you will definitely fall, you might even cry, hopefully you won’t break anything, and the cute graphic on the underside of your board will rub off. (Major bummer, I know.)

But the good stuff outweighs the bad.  Longboarding is a great workout, it’s eco-friendly transportation, and really, what guy doesn’t like a girl who can ride?

(Also: You can put whatever stickers you want on your board, so if your favorite graphic rubs off, just pick a better one…)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2012 at 5:17 pm and is filed under I'm The Intern. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.