The Fire Service

The fire service. While I know this site is supposed to be about fitness, it’s probably a good idea to talk about firefighters a little bit, as opposed to just jumping feet first into the fitness side of things. I think it will help you understand why fitness is so important for firefighters.

Type-A. The easiest 2-word description of a firefighter. Almost every firefighter you meet will fall into this personality category to some degree. It is obvious on older, “saltier” firefighters while it may be more hidden on the newer guys. This personality is a good thing for a firefighter, because most of us don’t need our hands held, or even to be told what needs to be done. We just get it done. To some degree autonomously (with a few years experience, of course). Our departments establish SOPs and SOGs, which most of us learn early in our careers and based on how much senior firefighters and training officers drilled us, we never forget them. When the bells go off, we do what we were trained to do. We do what needs to be done.

When we are young firefighters, the physical stuff is easier, especially for guys who have been in laborious jobs prior to becoming firefighters. As we are all acutely aware, firefighting is a physically demanding career choice, and it doesn’t get any easier as we get older. Those type-A personalities will push us through the job at hand, even if we aren’t physically prepared. That’s where we can get ourselves into trouble. That type-A push will sometimes force us to push ourselves to finish the job, even when our bodies may be telling us to stop and take a rest. That’s when even a little physical conditioning would do us some good. The worst part is that every one of us has been in the spot that we wish we would have not skipped that day (or month or year) of physical conditioning. On average, we put 100 firefighters on the walls in Colorado Springs, Colorado and Emmitsburg, Maryland each year. Between 40 and 60% of those men and women fell into the classification of ‘overexertion’. The one classification we as firefighters have the most personal control over, yet we also get the most complacent in.

Start off with just a little exercise if you’ve been out of it a while, and work up to the level that you would expect the younger guys to be. After all, we should all meet the same standards regardless of rank or seniority. If we expect it from the newer, younger guys, it should be expected of all of us. It is expected of all of us by the citizens we serve. It is expected from our families because they want us home at the end of a shift. We owe them all that.

Stay safe and fit, Randy