There’s an old saying: You eat an elephant one bite at a time. The same logic applies to wooly mammoths, because that best describes the subject of physical fitness within the fire service. It should be a simple marriage, really. Yet, we’ve adopted a mentality that “anybody can do our job” and thus have poisoned the well.
Let’s go back a few years. You’re put through the requisite battery of physical testing to get hired, presumably as if that’s the only time in your career that you’ll have to wear all that stuff and do all those things with any shred of efficiency. After you’re sworn in, it’s kick back and coast-only 24 years and 364 days until retirement. “Somebody pinch me,” you say to yourself, “I must be dreaming.”
Actually, it’s a nightmare, considering that half of the annual firefighter line-of-duty deaths (LODDs) and the vast majority of line- of-duty injuries are directly attributed to being out of shape. Every year, the fire service guarantees us two things: More than a hundred of us are going to die in the line of duty; and the cause in half of those deaths will be predictable and preventable. That’s a huge statement. Would this situation be acceptable in any other industry, especially in the private sector? The answer is most emphatically no!
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