PATHWAYS TO PURPOSE
The Roll of a Lifetime: Brooke Pavek It’s hard for Brooke Pavek to remember a time when skating wasn’t part of her life. Her dad enjoyed being active outside in the Florida sunshine with the kids, and Pavek loved being on wheels as soon as she put on her first pair of roller skates. “I thought it was the coolest thing, and I wouldn’t even take them off in the house,” Pavek recalled. Her passion for wheels carried on through college, where it also served a commuting purpose to get around campus and to downtown, as she didn’t have a car. “I’m always on my skates. I’ll skate to get my groceries!” But last summer, the 23-year- old Pavek wanted to give herself a fun challenge before she had to buckle down for law school. She was mulling over hitting some of the state’s longer rail-trails, when she happened upon a map showing the Florida Coast-to- Coast Trail (rtc.li/fla-c2c), a nearly complete, 250-mile route across the state, and instantly knew that that’s what she wanted to do—on her traditional quad skates, of course. In addition to trails in the United States, including the famed long-distance Appalachian Trail (appalachiantrail.org), Talone has also hiked throughout Europe and Canada and has no plans to stop. “The one thing I’ll always do, as long as I physically can, is walk,” Talone explained, noting that he typically covers 20 to 25 miles in a day. “Only positive things come out of walking—there’s no down- side to it. I feel like the luckiest person in the world that I get to see all this.”
because I had just fallen and was all bloody. But going on that trail, it calmed me down and I was like, ‘OK, this is why I do it.’” Shortly after her fall, the trail’s murals also gave her a much-needed morale boost. “I saw a fox on one of the murals, and I love foxes. It was the coolest little symbol to keep me going.” When Pavek says she loves foxes, she really means it: She competes in roller derby for the Gainesville Roller Rebels, where her name is Swift Fox, and her skates are, of course, adorned with foxes. She even helps out part-time at a fox sanctuary. The second day of her trip went smoothly, spanning another 80 miles or so. The occasional gaps in the trail were navigated via sidewalks and bike lanes, plus one short car trip. She finished her skate on the third day by rolling onto the St. Petersburg Pier over Tampa Bay at the end of the Pinellas Trail [rtc.li/pinellas-trail]—a moment that brought her to tears.
“Skating has gotten me to like my body a lot more. I think it makes me focus less on what it looks like in the mirror and more on what my body can do.” — Brooke Pavek, law student who skated across Florida
Although the experience was at times difficult, said Pavek, she “learned that sometimes stubbornness pays off. Because there were a couple moments where I was just going like, ‘It’s too hot. Why am I even trying to do this?’ But then I was like, ‘OK, I can get this many miles in and I can push myself to do this.’” That July, Pavek launched her adventure from Titusville on Florida’s Space Coast, zipping through 80 miles on her first day. The coast-to-coast route links more than a dozen trails, and Pavek’s favorite was the one she happened upon when she needed it the most. Her scariest moment of the journey occurred on the first day as she was coming down a steep bridge and took a tumble, resulting in a nasty gash on her thigh. “I really liked the Seminole Wekiva Trail [rtc.li/seminole- wekiva] because it has nice asphalt and goes through a lot of woods and is very peaceful,” said Pavek. “It was what I needed after that emotional moment, because I was like, ‘Maybe I just quit right now’
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