My dad gave me my first skateboard as a present for my 6^th birthday after a lot of wishing and whining on my part. I remember it pretty well. He had bought it at an informal shopping center in Lima that I loved to go to called “Polvos Rosados”. It was an off-brand board, with rubber wheels that seemed like they were designed to slow you down and a very awkwardly printed image of Spider-Man underneath. My dad didn’t know a lot about skateboards back then and I didn’t either, but what he did know was that I loved Spider-Man, so huge props to him for making his son very happy on his birthday – that board is a fond memory of mine now. At the time, that was all I needed to learn how to ride and my dad helped me accomplish that too by driving my little brother and me to the local skate park in the district of Miraflores. At the park, he would oversee our young and uncoordinated efforts to start rolling and do tricks like the big kids. Today I don’t use a skateboard anymore, but I cruise almost everywhere I need to go on a penny board, and I could not be more grateful to my dad for spending all that time when I was younger encouraging me to get up and try again when I fell. Thanks, dad.

Now I want to encourage you to give this a shot. I want to tell you why you need to learn how to ride a board. There are several different boards you could choose from. I mean skateboards, longboards, penny boards, cruiser boards, shortboards, e-boards or boardgames. I’m going to focus on penny boards though because that is what I use now and what I love the most.

Skateboarding in my school in the early days. Credits to my friends out there with me that day, you know who you are.

I didn’t realize how great it was to be able to ride a penny board until I started college. These things are fast. Not faster than a bike, but faster than a skateboard and much faster than anyone walking on foot, including those Olympic race walkers you might sometimes see on TV (what are they doing with their lives?). Getting from point A to point B quickly and with relatively low effort is great. It gives you more time to have a meal, study, speak to a friend you run into on the way to class, or simply check your Instagram feed for 5 more minutes and chuckle noisily to yourself at that extra meme you saw about Justin Bieber and his feature in “Despacito”. These are little things, but they begin adding up over time and end up making a difference in your life. When you get a penny board, the radius of places you can go to without having to spend money is immediately enlarged too. Suddenly it becomes realistic to go shopping or to the movies without catching an Uber or taking the T (if you’re in Boston), which is a cool perk. Also, penny boards have the advantage of being more portable than bikes and almost any other kind of board. Because of this, you can take them into buildings without any problems. You don’t have to leave them outside chained to a rack or a pole and risk getting it stolen, and you’re not going to have a bad time dragging them into lecture like you would a longboard. So as a mere means of transportation, penny boards are a very sensible choice.

Penny boards are also so much fun; I can never find the words to express the joy of getting on one and just pushing off and then nasdfljsdfkljnhdsjngdtfy

They’re fun. Riding around on a warm summer day and feeling the breeze cooling you down is just fantastic. If you want to make the most out of your board, you can learn some basic tricks like carving and sliding, and there you have the beginning of the highly fulfilling hobby called cruising. What’s even better is when you get friends to start cruising with you too, and then you have the whole gang riding the hell out of that street and it’s just a swell, swell time. Penny boards are also extremely stylish: you can get pretty much any combination of colors you can imagine because if the one you have in mind doesn’t exist, you can literally design one yourself. And all of this for a very reasonable price.

So guys, seize the summer. Add learning how to ride a penny board to your to-do list. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t “get it” in the first few minutes, or hours, or days, or even weeks. We live in a society of instant gratification where it’s harder to accept that some things take time; but they do whether we like it or not. So just practice consistently. Maybe you’ll try it and find out you like skateboarding or longboarding more. Or you might try it and hate it. But perhaps you’ll give it a shot and start to like it, and soon we’ll see one more person cruising happily down the streets and having a beautiful day.

Ride on, everybody.