During the pandemic, some people took up bread baking, and some took up gardening.

For some, politics and the coronavirus forced us to reach within and discover the things that make us feel more at peace. Los Angeles Times columnist Jean Guerrero recently found her zen on a longboard. In an interview for "LA Times Today," Guerrero told host Lisa McRee about her hobby, and the peace it brought to her.

What You Need To Know

  • Longboards are bigger than skateboards, and people can use their board to perform tricks or choose to simply cruise along

  • LA Times columnist Jean Guerrero turned to longboarding in the early days of the pandemic and found a sense of peace on her board

  • Longboarding also connected Guerrero with her father, who boarded in his youth

  • The community that longboarding afforded Guerrero was a lifesaver during the pandemic, when social connections were hard to find

As Guerrero explained, a longboard is basically a longer skateboard. Longboarding was started in the 1950s by surfers who wanted to practice on land when the surf wasn’t high. People use them to commute to work, or just cruise along. Some people even dance on their longboards and perform tricks.

“During the pandemic, we saw the beach closures. I was in my hometown of San Diego at the time, and suddenly I couldn’t spend time in the ocean and I was trying to figure out how I was going to stay sane,” Guerrero said. “And that’s when a friend of mine just completely out of the blue sent me this gift of a longboard. It’s not something I would have bought for myself, but I was immediately very intrigued and excited to check it out. I immediately drove to an abandoned parking lot on the San Diego Bay. By watching these videos that my friend had sent me of people longboard dancing and doing this really amazing, breathtaking footwork, I just started to learn. I was listening to music and just kind of going slow and eventually just getting more and more comfortable on board.”

There is a sense of peace and community that Guerrero experiences on her board.

“For me, there’s something about longboarding that really embodies this feeling of liminality unleashed, is the way that I described it,” she said. “As somebody who grew up on the border, I’ve always just been attracted to the in-between. The neither here nor there, the liminal spaces that being on a longboard and cruising along really just embodies and unleashes. And that’s how it started out. For me … there was just this sense of being OK with the uncertainty, being OK with the chaos, and kind of feeling like I have in a way like harnessing it and in control of it for a little while.”

Eventually, longboarding became a social activity for Guerrero, too.

“When the boardwalk reopened, I went to the boardwalk and started to do a lot of spontaneous dancing on the board because I was just overwhelmed with a sense of joy from the freedom that this gave to me,” she explained. “Then it was just funny because people would watch me, and they would laugh, or they would interact with me in some way. Not like laughing at me, but they were laughing kind of with me, and they were like amused. They found the sight of me in my NASA hoodie kind of funny. It wasn’t something that I was looking for, but I realized I was really hungry for it. There was a sense of disconnection in the pandemic, a sense of loneliness. And suddenly I had this path to safely connect with all these strangers.”

In October 2020, a video of a man on his longboard dancing to a Fleetwood Mac song went viral. Guerrero said she knows the feeling he was capturing on his board.

“It’s just joy. I just loved it,” Guerrero said. “He’s not doing any technical crazy stuff. He’s just cruising along and listening to Fleetwood Mac. That video just exploded and went viral because the joy that it embodied. … It really connected and resonated with a lot of people. And that’s sort of the feeling that it has for me.”

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Longboarding also gave Guerrero an unexpected connection to her father.

“My dad, he was absent from my life for many years,” Guerrero explained. “I wrote an entire book about my pursuit of him, chasing him. He struggled with substance abuse issues and some mental health issues throughout my life. And even though I wrote an entire book about him, he never told me that he used to skateboard, too. So that was really funny. When I started longboarding and I mentioned to him I had hurt my chin trying a trick called the Peter Pan, where you cross one foot over the other. And he was like, ‘Oh my God, you know, I used to skateboard all the time over by the San Diego Bay.’ It was just a really funny coincidence and another sort of way that we connected.”

“The Spanish word for hope is Esperanza, the same word as the Spanish word for waiting. For me, that’s really what longboarding embodies is just like this transformation of waiting and anxiety and into just pure hope and optimism,” Guerrero said.

Watch “LA Times Today” at 7 and 10 p.m. Monday through Friday on Spectrum News 1 and the Spectrum News app.