Marcela Guimaraes//Staff Writer

Photos courtesy of Marcelo Gervasio Silva

Long-distance skaters drift with a purpose

When Dave Cornthwaite found himself on his 25th birthday living a life he didn’t want to live, he didn’t simply change his career path or pick up a new hobby. Instead he picked up a longboard and embarked on what would lead him to a world record-breaking journey across Australia.
“I was making really bad choices,” Cornthwaite, an ex-graphic designer and now full-time adventurer, says. “I was literally doing something I hated for money, which now I realize most people do.”

To break out of his unhappy nineto-five life, he decided to embark on a snowboarding journey. Only problem: He lived in a town with no snow. So Cornthwaite bought himself a longboard to improve his snowboarding skills.

“I never skated before, and I kind of just fell in love with it over the course of the first two weeks,” he says.

A mere 14 days after stepping on his longboard for the first time, Cornthwaite quit his job and set a new goal for himself: “[I] made myself a promise that I was going to do something that I’d never done before,” he says. “And that was to skate farther than anyone else has ever skated.”

“I knew from the very beginning that if I could skate 10 meters I could skate 4,000 miles.” Dave Cornthwaite

To test his abilities, Cornthwaite skated across Great Britain from John O’Groats to Lands End in June 2006 in preparation for his dream expedition across Australia. The journey took him 34 days and covered 896 miles, only about a quarter of what he would ultimately skate in Australia.

“The UK trip was a way to prepare myself physically,” he says. “And also that psychological strength that you need to accomplish a journey like this, so that was all preparatory.”

Cornthwaite became the first person to ever skate the length of Britain. But Cornthwaite wanted a bigger challenge, so two months later, he headed to Perth, Australia, to embark on his 3,618-mile impossible journey across the continent.

The unprecedented journey was far from easy, and Cornthwaite endured several challenges along the way — everything from local wildlife to dangerous traffic to blazing hot temperatures.

“My body never really had to deal with anything like it before,” he says. “After about 2,000 miles, my body really started to break down. My immune system wasn’t quite as strong. It’s pretty impossible to introduce as much nutrition into your body that it’s using up during an endurance trip like this.”

Cornthwaite says he started developing blisters and ulcers and, ultimately, he had to listen to his body and skate for shorter periods and sleep a bit more.

January 22, 2007, was a momentous day for Cornthwaite. It was the day his 156-day journey across Australia came to an end in Brisbane.

“I kind of knew from the very beginning that if could skate 10 meters I could skate 4,000 miles but there’s so much that can happen … that can stop you from reaching the goal,” he says. “But just being able to persevere in the course of five months and finally cross that finish line was a brilliant feeling.”

The Guinness World Records recognized the expedition at the time for the longest distance traveled by longboard. The record has since been broken by New Zealander Rob Thomson, who skated 7,555 miles across Europe, North America and China.

A NEW START

The world-record breaking journey inspired Cornthwaite to chase a new passion in life.

“It set me on a brand new path for a different life, a different career, a different lifestyle, a different mentality,” he says.

Cornthwaite was offered a book deal and eventually published “BoardFree,” a book on his longboarding journeys.

“[I] realized that adventure was really the path I wanted to take,” he says. “Although it’s not really something you can study at university or school. It’s not something your career advisor says, ‘go and be an adventurer.’”

With a thirst for adventure and a desire to push his limits, Cornthwaite developed Expedition1000, a career project in which Cornthwaite intends to take 25 separate journeys of 1,000 miles or more, each using a different mode of nonmotorized transportation.

“You experience life in so many different forms of colors while you’re on an expedition,” he says. “When I finished and came home to a place that was familiar, it just seemed very gray. The world didn’t seem as exciting as it had been before. So I wanted to give myself a long-term project.”

So far, Cornthwaite has completed 11 journeys, including tandem biking from Vancouver to Vegas, standup paddle boarding across the Mississippi River and ice trekking across Western Europe. Cornthwaite says with 14 more journeys to go, he wants to try horseback riding, paragliding, unicycling, kite surfing and windsurfing.

While trekking a minimum of 1,000 miles may seem taxing to some, Cornthwaite pushes himself with his motto: Say yes more.

“It’s really important that we all listen to ourselves and exactly what our gut’s telling us,” he says. “It’s so easy to very quickly end up living a life that we don’t want to be living and doing a job that we don’t really feel passionate about. This key to really understanding yourself is just to do lots of new things and take on different opportunities.”

Cornthwaite encourages people to step outside their comfort zones and think about their next great adventure.

“It doesn’t have to be over the course of five months, it could just be a couple of weeks,” he says. “But go outside, camp in the open air, just realize how beautiful life is without having to stare at a screen all day.”

SKATING JAPAN FOR A GOOD CAUSE

Cornthwaite’s record-breaking expedition didn’t only leave a mark in the books. His journey also helped raise more than $30,000 for three charities in the UK and Australia.

Charitable distance skating is a fairly new phenomenon, in which an individual or a group of people takes on a long distance journey on a longboard or skateboard with an associated fundraising effort. The most recent and notable effort was made by New Zealander Jack Courtenay, who skated nearly 1,000 miles across Japan in 2013 to raise money for orphans affected by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.

Like Cornthwaite, Courtenay was working several dead-end jobs and had a thirst for adventure and a desire to see the world. Having never been to Japan, Courtenay wanted to experience the side of Japan that tourists don’t usually see.

“I wanted to come to Japan and go way out into the countryside and meet real Japanese people, and at the same time I wanted to test the strength of myself, mentally and physically,” he says.

Courtenay says he didn’t have much experience with long distance skateboarding and to him, this journey was very much a challenge.

 

“Everyday was a challenge,” he says.

“You skate between eight to 12 hours a day, you pitch a tent on the side of the road anywhere you can find, and then you get up and do the same thing every single day.”

Courtenay says the hardest part of his trip was getting started every day.

“Your feet would just be like completely sore, your legs would be sore, and your back is aching,” he says. “But once you get into that zone, it’s like a runner’s high, then it’s just all smooth sailing.”

While the wildlife in Australia posed some difficulties for Cornthwaite, Courtenay says in Japan, they were one of the best parts of his trip.

As he glided through the Japanese countryside, he encountered herds of deer, snakes and dragonflies, and praying mantises as big as his hand.

But what made his 975-mile journey special was the local people he met along the way.

Because of Courtenay’s eastern coastline route, he knew he would meet people directly affected by the tsunami.

“I figured after my trip — since I would have seen the whole coast —I’d seen all the damage and I’d meet people who were affected by it,” he says. “I knew I wanted to help in some sort of way because it would have affected me after.”

Courtenay raised $1,000 for GlobalGiving after his 33-day journey to help orphans in Japan rebuild their lives.

For Courtenay, his Japan expedition was a revelation of what he was capable of.

“After this trip, I saw how strong I was physically and mentally, but I look back at it now and I’m just like ‘Oh, how did I manage to do that? No idea how I did that,’” he says. “But I still feel like I could push myself more and more after this trip.”

Courtenay says his Japan expedition was just the beginning and intends on continuing to do long distance longboarding journeys around the world.

“Once you get into that zone, it’s like a runner’s high, then it’s just all smooth sailing.” Jack Courtenay

TREKKING IN MEMORY

While Courtenay trekked across Japan for a good cause, Marcelo Gervasio Silva was on the other side of the world attempting a similar feat. In 2010, the Brazilian native set off to longboard across Brazil and southern South America in memory of his father.

Before his father passed away, the 53-year-old adventurer initially planned to do the trip by bike. But while assembling his bike, Silva cut his hand pretty badly and realized he needed another mode of transportation. It was then that Silva decided to hop on a longboard and set off on his journey.

Silva’s first long-distance journey was traveling within Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, skating 27 miles in five hours.

“A friend saw me in Sao Crisovao neighborhood, which is a 22 km (14 miles) distance from Copacabana, and told me, ‘If you came from Copacabana to here, one day you will go around the world by skate,’” Silva says.

Silva’s journey across South America is the longest skateboarding journey to date, yet isn’t recognized by the Guinness World Records. Starting in French Guiana, Silva trekked 9,959 miles in 363 days, ending in Punta del Diablo, Uruguay.

Silva continues to travel and is attempting to travel the world by longboard. But Silva isn’t concerned with recognition or money. For him the trip is more personal.

“I do the trip around the world to honor my father who died,” Silva says. “I don’t do it for money, neither for sponsorship. I have money.”

Silva was nicknamed the “green pedal” growing up because his bike pedals were always filled with dirt and grass. Even as a kid, he had a craving for adventure. At 6 years old, Silva says he climbed his first mountain, at 1,300 feet, completely alone.

“I saw the cardinals (points) and learned about the continents with my compass, a gift from my dad,” he says. “That developed my sense of geographical direction and to this day, I have never used a GPS.”

LONGBOARDING ACROSS THE WORLD

Silva’s day on the road starts at around 3 or 4 in the morning. He gets a bite to eat, then hits the road.

“What I like most is being on the road,” Silva says. “I love skating, stopping by rivers, photographing all the road signs and being happy. Because I don’t have a boss and I’m not accountable for anything, I can be the commander of my own ship.”

But skating across the world is no easy task.

“You need five skates, one for every continent, physical conditioning for four months, airplane tickets to cross the ocean or a country at war, a Western Union account to receive anything of value and one or two people on the Internet you trust in case of an emergency,” he says.

Safety is also always a concern on the road. Silva says he often encounters thieves on the road waiting to steal merchandise and has also been run over and hunted numerous times. But skating itself is probably the most dangerous aspect of his journey.

“We can all die in a blink of an eye,” Silva says.

“Five times I saw death come close. My skate has secrets that I don’t reveal but allow me to travel with more safety. But the things I do, I could easily die.” For Silva, the danger is just a risk he has to take to see the world. “Since I cover around 184 km (114 miles) in one day, I see a little of everything,” Silva says. Riding at such high speeds even earned him the name “The man with the flying board” in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile.

At 53 years old, Silva says he feels like 27, and he owes it all to sports and adventuring. Now as he travels around the world, Silva promotes his healthy lifestyle and is an activist for getting kids off the streets and into a life-affirming physical activity.

“I believe all athletes should send a positive message to children,” Silva says.

Silva says he wants to see skateboarding promoted as a healthy pastime for kids and is even developing a sports medicine project with the best physicians in Brazil.

Born into a family of doctors and engineers, Silva says he always felt like the black sheep. He loves helping the kids, but he knew medicine itself wasn’t his calling.

“[I was] the one that didn’t want to study and preferred to skydive, climb, bike, run in marathons and travel around the world,” Silva says. “Now, when I see my family I say: ‘I know about 17,000 doctors, another 12,000 engineers, but only one person who has ever skated around the world!’”