Gabrielle Franze is a Firefighter and Paramedic with the Orange County Fire Department in Orange County, Florida, and the founder of Redline K9 Dog Training in Deltona, Florida. She began competing in CrossFit at 18 and has competed annually in the CrossFit Games ever since. After earning an Associate of Science in Emergency Medical Services and Paramedicine from Seminole State College in 2019, she joined the Orange County Fire Department that same year. She also holds over a dozen professional certifications spanning paramedicine, firefighting, emergency vehicle operations, and wildland response.
Alongside her career in fire rescue, she built Redline K9 Dog Training in 2020, a business focused on training dogs for obedience. Her dogs Nova, Rip, Atlas, and Oakly each work and train in distinct capacities, from disaster recovery training to certified hospital emotional support. Franze approaches both professions with the same philosophy: consistency, preparation, and trust-based systems.
Q&A with Gabrielle Franze
How do you personally define success?
Success for me is not a destination. It is whether I am doing the work I said I would do, day after day, without needing a reason. When I look at my schedule at the end of the week and nothing was skipped because it was inconvenient, that feels like success. It is a practice, not a prize.
I grew up watching my parents run our family business seven days a week, rain or shine. They were not waiting for things to be easier. They just showed up. That image is still my clearest definition of what it looks like to succeed consistently.
What turning points shaped the way you approach your career?
CrossFit was the first real turning point. I started at 16 to build endurance for soccer, because I wasn’t the most skilled player and it ended up rewriting how I thought about effort. Six months in, I gave up soccer entirely and committed to CrossFit. I competed in my first CrossFit Games at 18. That experience taught me that when something challenges you at your actual limit, that is where the real development happens.
The second turning point was my first real shift after joining the Orange County Fire Department. Training prepares you, but the job introduces you to a sense of team with variables that no classroom covers. Staying calm in chaotic enviornments requires trust and skill. I had to build both deliberately.
How do you think about failure?
Early in my career, I tried to do too many things at the same time. I wanted to be the best at everything, but I burned out instead. It was not dramatic, but I lost focus for a period. What I learned is that refocusing means allowing time for recovery and pacing. These are not signs of weakness, but resilience. They are part of the performance system. I started thinking about rest and reset the same way I think about training blocks.
Now I protect recovery time the way I would protect a shift commitment. It is scheduled and non-negotiable.
What habits produce results for you?
Planning the night before. If I decide what the next day looks like before I sleep, I do not have to worry about missing something or making decisions when I am tired. That eliminates a layer of friction that compounds over time.
Physical training is essential for me, even when I do not feel like it. Motivation is unreliable. Consistency is not. I have found that the days I least want to train are often the days the training helps the most.
How do you handle pressure without losing accuracy?
Repetition of fundamentals. In all aspects of my life, but in particular, In firefighting, in paramedicine, and in canine training, the fundamentals are what hold when the situation deteriorates. If I have done something correctly one thousand times, my nervous system knows what to do in the eleven hundredth, even if that instance is an emergency.
I also reduce unnecessary decisions in my environment so I am not burning cognitive resources on things that do not require them.
What tradeoffs have you accepted to build this career?
I work two demanding jobs simultaneously. That is a real tradeoff in time and energy. Building Redline K9 while working shifts is not easy to schedule. I accepted early that I would have less downtime than most people and that the work itself would have to be what I find restorative.
The alignment between the two careers helps. Canine training draws on my passion and the same disciplines as fire service: structure, preparation, staying calm under pressure, working in systems. They reinforce each other rather than compete.
What would you tell someone starting out?
Slow down. Skills will compound over time, so allow the time to do that. There is no timeline you have to meet to prove your worth. Worth is proven when the work is done correctly and at a sustainable pace, rather than work done fast and unreliably.
Also: review the basics constantly. In my fields, fundamentals are not what you graduate past. They are what you return to time and time again, especially when things get complicated. It is a trusted place to land when you need to reset, ground, and start again.
What does long-term success look like for you from here?
I want to build structured training programs for search & rescue, and canine emotional support dogs for first responders’ that are specifically tied to mental health recovery. Not therapy. Support. Working dogs that are trained and prepared to be part of how fire and rescue personnel process the psychological weight of the job.
That is where both careers converge. That is what I am building and working toward.