What's the true measure of firefighter fitness?

I recently had my yearly physical, and I'm convinced the staff of the Phoenix Fire Department's health center loves us. The examination takes a full morning and incorporates a lot of different processes, but the part of the physical I most look forward to is the lung-capacity test. It involves taking four deep breaths and exhaling as quickly as you can into a cardboard device that looks like a toilet-paper tube. It leaves you with a major buzz.

A few years ago while completing the pulmonary-function test, I experienced a brief yet complete loss of consciousness. The person conducting the test was a tall, slender female paramedic. She was on light duty while recovering from a job-related injury and was very excited to return to the real world of shift work the following week. Her voice and facial expression were saturated with enthusiasm as she described how the lung-test worked (she was a C-shifter). When she finished, I told her I would make her proud and proceeded to blow four of the biggest B-shift breaths ever breathed into a stupid cardboard tube. I can't remember anything after the end of the fourth exhalation, but I woke to find our resident doctor and nurse pulling my large, semi-conscious ass off the bubbly C-shifter. I stood against the wall on wobbly legs, blood running into my eye from a very minor forehead laceration, as the medical team attended to Miss Perky. It doesn't take an A-shifter to figure out what happens to a 120-lb. C-shifter when a 265-lb. B-shifter falls on her. She remained on light duty for another few months, but on the bright side I set the record for blowing into the pneumo tube. 

We are fortunate that our department invested in a health center 20 years ago. Our department spends as much money maintaining firefighters as it spends maintaining its fleet of apparatus. This program keeps our members healthier — leading to better service delivery — and it gives our humanist fire chief a warm fuzzy every time he thinks about it.

For many of us, the health center serves as our primary-care physician. Each year we receive a comprehensive physical. There are at least a dozen Phoenix firefighters still walking around today who would have died from some type of medical malady had it not been for their yearly exam. In many instances, our yearly physical forces us to take better care of ourselves because the health center's cardio-crazy staff has developed a comprehensive wellness and fitness program.

Part of our physical exam includes a blood analysis. A month prior to the company's physical, a health-center paramedic comes to the station and draws about 85 test tubes of blood from each member of the crew. There are very rigid rules for bloodletting, the biggie being that you can't eat for 12 hours beforehand. When we first fired up our health center, none of us knew about the 12-hour fast. Back in the early years, one of the health center's nurses came out to the station to draw blood. There were 16 of us, so it took more than an hour to bleed the group. The blood technician had a specially designed wire basket that carried all the blood-laden test tubes in an upright position. By the time she had bled three-quarters of the group, we noticed a white substance that looked liked Sno Caps floating on top of the samples. Before long, the top half of the blood samples appeared to be covered in shortening. When one of us pointed this out to the blood tech, she shook her head and asked when we last ate and what we had. We told her we finished a late breakfast of chorizo, egg and potato burritos right before she arrived. She gave us specific instructions about fasting prior to next shift's blood draw between bites of her own tasty, cholesterol-laden breakfast burro. (The blood-draw thing has triggered a memory I wish to share: During the early years of my career, my brother and I toyed with the idea of taking the paramedic test. We both liked the idea of almost doubling our salary, and it was widely known that paramedics got to hook up with nurses, so it sounded like a sound career path. We signed up for all the required college classes and pursued our dream. One of our classes was Anatomy and Physiology. Our teacher was a 30-something female doctor who smoked long, skinny, brown cigarettes. One day, my brother — a chronic and habitual tobacco chewer — told our very intelligent teacher,

"You'd think that a doctor would know better than anyone about the causes of lung cancer." Our teacher took a long drag off her blunt, looked crossways at my brother, and with smoke wafting out of her mouth told him, "Medical science has come a long way. If I get lung cancer, they'll take a lung, but I'll recover and still look damn good. If your chewing tobacco gives you the big C, a doctor will cut off the bottom half of your face, and you'll end up spending the rest of your life drooling into a chin bucket.")

Are Carbs Still Bad?
One of the challenges with health and fitness is wading through the never-ending glut of nutrition information. Some experts claim bread is your enemy and mayonnaise is your friend. How in the hell do you eat mayo without bread? Others lecture that dairy products are the root of all evil. Remember when we were ordered to avoid eggs? The extremists advocate eating only raw, whole foods. What causes a person to delve to this level of insanity? Living on liquefied grass is fine if you are a goat or cow, but humans need a varied diet that includes carbohydrates, protein, fats and chocolates. Cooler heads are prevailing, and now butter and wine are back in vogue. We finally have something to thank the French for.

Nutrition is only part of the overall wellness equation. A few years before I joined the fire service, my department implemented a physical training (PT) program. At the training academy, we did PT every morning: stretching and calisthenics followed by a 5-mile run.

I was never much of a runner, and my 5-mile jaunt usually took as much time as baking a 5-lb. meatloaf. One of my academy mates was a world-class runner, and he would complete the 5 miles twice, finishing up with me his second time around.

My runner friend served as the physical-fitness role model for our academy class right up until the time we started doing engine- and ladder-company operations. He could run like a deer, but after 30 minutes of heavy physical labor, the bottom would drop out. One morning our class was doing hose lays; it was our fourth or fifth evolution, I was the plugman and my runner mate was the nozzleman. The engine stopped at the plug, our captain yelled, "Take the plug," and I jumped off the rig and proceeded to take the plug. I finished with my plug work, jogged up to the rig, put the hydrant wrench back on the truck and donned my SCBA. As I came around the side of the apparatus, I saw the highly aerobic nozzleman struggling to pull the 1.5" hose load out of the transverse hose bed.

One of our instructors studied a stopwatch intently as he screamed, "What are you doing? There are children burning to death while you're f-ing around! You have got 45 seconds left to pass this hose evolution!" If we flunked, we ran. I hated running, as did most of my other classmates. It was evident the gazelle was not going to get the line in operation, despite the instructors' motivational lectures and the fledgling firefighters pleadings. I walked over and grabbed my struggling classmate, put my arm through the hose load loops, picked him up and pulled the hose bed. I moved at the same speed as I did during my morning run, only this time I was carrying 170 lbs. of fully turned out, top-flight aerobic firefighter and a charged attack line. As our instructor told us we passed our hose evolution (and wouldn't have to run laps), my little runner buddy puked and passed out.     

How Should We Measure Fitness?
The fitness level and overall wellness of our members is what our health center is all about. The end goal is to have a healthy and fit workforce. This broad goal allows our health-center staff to focus on each individual member, making recommendations that will improve both the quantity of life and quality of health. To a lesser degree, these health-center recommendations have the potential to improve each member's physical capacity to deliver service (i.e. drag hose lines, beat their way into burning buildings, lift really heavy customers, etc.). Off to the side is another large issue of what type of physical attributes do we use to test for the position of firefighter? This is where what looks good on paper collides with reality. Most doctors, exercise physiologists and other medical professionals would have pronounced my runner classmate to be the fittest person in my academy class — in fact some of these people did. The problem is firefighting has nothing in common with running, rowing, ellipticalizing or any other aerobic activity. On the other hand, when we do these activities as part of a regular fitness routine, we get in better shape, which can result in higher job performance. But firefighting still remains a very anaerobic activity.

The challenge for all of our organizations is to hire people who can do the job. Over the last decade our profession has refined the physical entrance exam for the firefighter's position with the CPAT (candidate physical activity test). The CPAT was a joint effort between the IAFF, the IAFC and 10 different fire departments. Phoenix was one of the cities that participated in this process. As one would imagine, a lot of different groups were involved in developing this test, including doctors, exercise physiologists, fitness trainers and various A-shifters. One of these early development teams was assembled at the training academy in my own hometown. One of the early CPAT courses was laid out on the drill grounds (or as we call it, the grinder), and a group of guinea pig firefighters ran through the course. Most of these lab rats represented the best and brightest our department had to offer. The gathered group of experts was thrilled beyond words as they monitored Phoenix Fire Department's super humans. The test was going as planned when one of our training-academy staff asked if they could send one of our department's future recruits through the CPAT course. The clinicians welcomed the opportunity to test one our future bionic firefighters.

One of our training captains went off to retrieve Aaron, who had been welding props for our burn house all day. He came out wearing a welder's apron and helmet with Frankenstein booties adorning his canoe-sized feet. He stood six and a half feet tall and weighed more than 300 pounds. He was the size of an entire ladder crew. The out-of-town clinicians looked at him like he was some kind of new virus. I don't blame them. He was a lot different than the Aryans our fitness Nazis had loaded the test with. Aaron finished the CPAT with one of the day's best scores, but that's not what had the gathered group concerned — it was the way he went through the course. It was almost too easy for him, and it looked like he was going to break all the props. One of the observers commented that when Aaron picked up the dummy for the rescue drag, it was so terrified that it voided the contents of its bladder.

Some of the clinicians voiced concerns that a man of that size would break down over time and eventually become a casualty of his career. They thought smaller, more aerobically tuned humans were better suited for a career in the fire service. This became such a big issue that the group took it to our fire chief, who patiently listened to the fitness scientists. When they were done voicing their concerns he told them, "If I had to pick any one person involved in this test to go into a burning building with me, I would choose Aaron." Aaron's career is coming up on 10 years, and he's a more capable firefighter today than he was on the day he confused the group of CPAT experts. My gazelle-like classmate ended up washing out of our department after five years. 

Nick Brunacini has been with the Phoenix (Ariz.) Fire Department since 1980 and has served as a firefighter, captain, battalion chief and shift commander. Brunacini helped develop the "Fire Command" and "Command Safety — Saving Our Own" curricula packages. He has been an instructor at Phoenix College since 1990.