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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast.
As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on
the show veteran firefighter and founder of Rogue Firemanship Training, Logan Broberg.
Now in this conversation, we discuss all things firefighter fitness.
From the 343 Hero Challenge that we both just competed in, his journey through multiple
smoke diver programs, training in or out of gear, fire department fitness standards, helping
firefighters chase their fitness goals and so much more.
Now before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment.
Go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and
leave a rating.
Every single five-star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for
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And this is a free library of over 1000 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so
I can get them to every single person on planet Earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Logan Broberg.
Enjoy.
Well Logan, I want to start by welcoming you to my home today.
And we just competed in the 343 Hero Challenge.
That'd be a good kind of icebreaker to get this going.
Talk to me about your experience a couple of years ago and then what you witnessed this
year doing that competition.
Yeah, thanks for having me and for all your hospitality so far.
And yeah, the first time I competed was two years ago and it was really great experience.
It's all for charity.
And did it with one of my buddies, Pena, and we just kind of went in and just had fun.
He had never really done a competition like that and I never really had either.
I do my style of training, I would consider it like cross training.
I don't necessarily always do CrossFit stuff, but I do a lot of those, you know, methods
and modalities that they have.
And then last year I was supposed to compete but I ended up having nasal surgery because
I had a deviated septum and it just happened to be I still couldn't work out.
And then shortly after that I ended up injuring my back anyways.
I was having some back issues.
I sat out, watched a bunch of members from my department.
They competed, watched them compete.
And then this last time, this past weekend was feeling good, so signed up.
And my buddy who used to work with me in Kissimmee, he's actually down in Miami-Dade now, but
he's really in the CrossFit.
He competes at a pretty high level.
So I asked if he wanted to do a team with me under the Rogue Firemanship team name just
to kind of help also get the company name out there.
And it was a really good time.
I think my favorite part was even though we were all competing, everybody was cheering
each other on.
You know, if you weren't warming up for your heat, mostly everybody was on the side cheering
everybody on and there was people from all over the state of Florida.
And it's just super humbling, you know, seeing people that kind of have the same mindset.
They're all, you know, fit or they want to be fit and they're doing it for a greater
cause just so it's awesome to be part of that.
People say to me, brotherhood and sisterhood is dead in the fire service.
I tell them you're just looking in the wrong places.
I would argue that the hero challenge is one place to go see where it's alive and well.
100%.
That's what I've learned in my short career so far is if it's not necessarily within your
four walls, then you just need to get out your four walls in your department because
I see stuff happening all the time across the country to benefit, you know, brothers
and sisters that are going through some hard times.
Absolutely.
Well, let's start at the very beginning of your journey.
And obviously we'll walk into the fire service.
Tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what
your parents did, how many siblings.
Yep.
So I was born in South Florida.
I grew up in a small town called Oxahatchee.
Most people have never heard of it.
So I just tell them that I grew up in West Palm because it was about 20 minutes west
of West Palm.
And my mom and dad were, they're still together.
And I have a little sister.
She's about four to five years younger than me.
My mom was a labor and delivery nurse for over 25 years and she worked in a town called
Belle Glade, which if you're not familiar with that town, it's a pretty rough town.
It's very low income, a lot of farm workers and sugar cane fields out there.
So that's kind of what she was dealing with her whole career.
And then my dad was a police officer for the same amount of time down in Boynton Beach.
And same thing, there's some pretty rough areas down in Boynton Beach.
So he pretty much was on the streets his whole career too, was a sergeant, which is like
equivalent to what a lieutenant is for us on the fire truck.
And just kind of grew up like a blue collar type family.
My dad for a few years on the side, he had a masonry business.
And around that time I was in middle school.
So he would kind of make me work with him during the summers, busting up concrete sidewalks,
reforming them and pouring them.
And his big thing was that if I didn't do good in school, that this was most likely
the type of work I was going to be doing.
And I did not really enjoy it.
I wish I'd paid attention a little more because I definitely could, you know, it'd be better
to know how to do some of that stuff, but it was just miserable.
It was South Florida in the middle of summer and I just wanted to get it over with and
get back home.
Brilliant.
So let's talk about your dad first.
Boynton Beach, we had Hugh Brooder on talking about their recent switch to 2472.
I don't want to dive into that at the moment, but this is kind of thought that, oh, it's
a very affluent city and that's how they're able to do it.
Talk to me about the other side, because most of us, you know, no matter where we work,
there's the wealthy area and then there's the low income area where you tend to usually
see more people struggling, the crime, that kind of thing.
So what were some of the stories you remember him talking about his time in Boynton?
Yeah, so I think South Florida as a whole, especially in Palm Beach County, it's pretty
unique because, you know, in the county, there's obviously money.
You know, you have the town of Palm Beach, which is Palm Beach Island and, you know,
where Trump and all the other millionaires live.
But in pretty much every city on that East Coast is you'll have, you know, really nice
areas more out West is kind of like a more suburban neighborhoods, blue collar neighborhoods.
But right before you cross the train tracks to get to the beach side is usually in every
single city along there is, you know, just low income neighborhoods, a drug, high drug
and high crime rates.
So my dad, like I said, he worked in Boynton Beach and in that area, they had a street
called Cherry Hill.
And that was usually one of the worst neighborhoods in that area.
And he would just always tell me stories, you know, of things going on.
Once I got a little older, he would let me do some ride along with them.
So I would ride around, kind of see what was going on.
And at the time, there was a big gang issue down there where they had a lot of Haitian
gangs kind of come onto the scene.
And the History Channel, they actually did a whole Gangland episode on one of the bigger
Haitian gangs down there.
And they were kind of causing a lot of havoc because they were doing a lot of drive by
shootings at the time.
And a lot of, you know, innocent people were getting hurt because of that.
That was interesting when the comments were made about people eating pets.
And my whole thing was, well, if we're talking about, you know, issues with Haitians, and
let's talk about, you said the Haitian gangs, because I remember living down in Hialeah
or living in Pembroke Pines and working in Hialeah, you know, there were certain areas
that if you went in, you know, you'd be lucky if you got out again.
So you know, the people that come from such a war torn place and then, you know, implanted
here and then obviously that criminality comes with them.
You know, I think that to me is a much more important conversation than maybe, you know,
one or two examples of maybe a family pet being taken.
Yeah, 100%.
I think what's unique about South Florida too, is it's, you know, a lot of people call
it a melting pot because there's people from everywhere come to South Florida.
You know, you have the port right there.
Cuba is not too far away.
So, you know, over the years, we had a lot of Cuban refugees that would come.
And so it's just a big melting pot.
You know, the Haitians were not the only ones causing crime.
I just remember, you know, there's a lot of news stories because they were, you know,
they were doing what gangs do.
They're trying to get territory from whatever other resident gangs are there.
And they were just very vicious and very, you know, aggressive.
Yeah.
Well, I think that's it.
That's it's not just the Haitians.
That's the point is that we have, I point this out a lot with, there's this kind of
negativity towards the police and why aren't they doing enough and why do they look like
they're going to war the way they're dressed?
And no one's saying, well, why are our streets so dangerous?
Why do we have the level of gangs?
You go to Norway or Portugal, they don't have that.
They don't, you know what I mean?
So this is a very, I think to me, a much bigger conversation than, you know, again, like I
said, a handful of pets go missing is the fact that all cultures and countries and colors
and creeds, we have them represented because of our illicit drug trade and the prohibition
of drugs.
We've created, we've encouraged this criminality on our streets, which then you and I and our
men and women in law enforcement respond to.
And then if it doesn't go right, we're the ones thrown under the bus.
Yeah, a hundred percent.
You know, and they want to defund the police and they don't really understand what that
actually means.
It's really just taking resources that they may have had to help combat these issues.
It's taking that away because I don't think a lot of people realize that some certain
crimes require specialty units.
It's not just your normal street or beat cop that's handling these issues.
You know, if there's a drug issue, they have a whole narcotics unit that's handling that,
or they have a whole gang unit.
Their only job is just to go after gangs and, you know, bust those things up.
Absolutely.
Well, switching to the other parent, your mom, labor delivery, working in an area where
I'm assuming there's a lot of migrant workers.
What was some of the things or the unique lens that she had working with those communities?
Yes, I remember her telling me, you know, there'd be 13 year old girls having babies
and I guess I just very low, low income, high drug rate city.
So you know, she was constantly delivering drug babies and dealing with that.
And the biggest thing that always stuck out was just the, you know, they kind of, I don't
want to say they isolated me from that.
I was aware of what was going on in the world, but as I got older, I couldn't imagine, you
know, being 13 years old and being pregnant and giving birth, you know, it's just, that's
crazy to me.
And like I said, I think a lot of people, if they're not, if they don't hear about it
or don't see it, they don't, it's out of sight, out of mind.
They don't realize these things are happening every day and they're not new issues.
And you know, sadly it's, she really enjoyed her work because she, she had to be good at
her job.
You know, it wasn't in a cush area where they had a lot of resources, you know, in that
city that was one of the only hospitals out there.
And then the next hospital over was, you know, 30, 40 minutes over.
She didn't, she didn't have to deal with some of the trauma stuff.
Cause obviously she was labor and delivery, but you know, people would roll up to that
hospital because it was the closest one and you know, there's gunshot wounds and stuff.
They're just dropping them off at the front door.
I literally, I had to call that was one of the stories in my new book that I wrote about
and it was a true story behind the story.
But yeah, and I mean, you know, blood in blood out, it's all about the homies.
Well, trust me, you know, when they just throw you out of a car and drive away, there's nothing
brotherly about that.
Right.
With that as well, what about the human trafficking element?
When you look at a lot of the migrant workers now, people don't think that men are trafficked,
but a lot of this, you know, these workers and these farms and these restaurants, you
know, a lot of them, sometimes there's coyotes and this trafficking element too.
Was she ever exposed to that?
I know it's kind of a new conversation these days.
No, not that I remember.
I remember, you know, when I was growing up at the time, you know, it was early, I was
in high school, I graduated high school in 2012.
So you figure early 2000s till 2012, the big thing down there, I remember my dad talking
about was the pill mills, you know, and he said you would, you would pull up behind a
car and it's like three or four, you know, white guys in it and they have plates from
like Ohio and he's like, you just flip your lights on and they'd want to be taken off
because they were just coming down here, hopping from pill from, you know, doctor's clinic
to doctor's clinic, getting the pain pills and then they would go back up obviously and
sell them.
And I remember that was a big thing in South Florida as well, where there was like hundreds
of those doctors offices that were illegally, well, not illegally, but that, you know, the
doctors are just making money.
So they're prescribing everybody and their mother, the pain pills.
And then now fast forward 15, 20 years and everybody's addicted to opiates now.
And now that's a whole nother issue.
You know, my dad, he got on in the nineties where it was probably crack was the big drug.
And now where I'm working, it's majority, you know, opiates, you know, we're not really
dealing with, I haven't really heard of anybody recently in my career, you know, when I run
on a patient, they're not taking, they're not smoking crack anymore.
It's either meth or heroin or, you know, maybe they'll do cocaine, but it's, you know, it's
just kind of crazy how the times change and stuff like that.
Yeah.
When I moved to the U S we started off in Orlando.
It's one of the fire academy.
And then I went into work for Hialeah when I was down there, my ex, my son's mother,
she got hired in this pseudo doctor's office.
And as time went on, she was like, it's really weird.
I've got these people, you know, flying down from New York and Ohio and West Virginia to
come and get these prescriptions from this doctor.
And he's just writing them, you know, all day and they come down and, you know, or we're
like overnighting these prescriptions to people or whatever it is.
And it was that it was it.
And luckily we, she kind of had this moment, which like, this just doesn't seem right.
And she left and it wasn't too long before all the ATF, you know, gangs were, you know,
kicking in doors and getting these people.
But I had a guy, San Quinones on the show who wrote dreamland and it's all about that.
And once the pill mill shut down, that's when the Mexican gangs started bringing the black
tar heroin and you had all these people that were dope sick that were relying on these
pill mills.
Not saying that was right, but when it was shut down, you had all these people strung
out.
And so now it was just an easy target for the cartels to come in.
So when we even talk about the whole border cartel issue, you know, our prohibition, our
American addicts that we consume 75% of the world's opioids, you know, that's all because
of, you know, Oxycontin and all these things that started this whole, you know, epidemic.
Yeah.
And it's sad, you know, because you have a normal, you know, productive member of society.
Maybe they have a family, they have a good career, they get addicted to these pills and
then it's just a downward spiral or, you know, some of these athletes, same thing.
Or, you know, we've heard stories of even police and firemen, you know, they get addicted
to the pain pills because of an injury and then it just spirals out of control.
So I know three that have died from overdoses from.
Yes.
Sad.
Yeah.
It's horrendous.
Well, we're going to obviously talk about fitness as well.
So going back to your early life, when you were in the school ages, what were you doing
and playing as far as sports and exercise?
So I tried baseball out.
I really didn't like it when I was really young.
It was very boring to me and it usually is at that age.
Now that I realized, you know, unless you're hitting the ball, it's probably not very fun.
So the big sport in my community where I grew up was football.
So I played football pretty much my whole life, all the way up into high school.
And then nobody really told me that being 110 pounds as a freshman, I was probably not
going to make the football team.
So I tried out for the freshman football team.
And that was a really cool experience, though, because they had a very good way of program.
They are very big on strength and conditioning.
So if they said, if you wanted to try out for the freshman football team, you'd come
the summer before school started and work.
They showed you how to lift weights at a full weight room.
And they showed you how to lift weights and strength train.
Then you would try out for the football team.
And if you made the cut, you made the cut.
If not, you didn't.
So I didn't make the cut.
And that was my first dose, I would say, of failing something, because I had played rec
sports my whole childhood.
And you pay to play when you're on a rec team.
You get picked to be on the team, and you play.
So I asked them, what could I do to just help my chances to get on the team next time?
Because they have a freshman JV and varsity team.
And they're like, well, you could try out for JVD in the spring.
And so I elected to actually be kind of like the equipment manager, which was more or less
a glorified water boy.
So I was a water boy.
Well, he ended up playing for the team.
So I've seen the movie.
Yeah.
That didn't happen for me, because what ended up happening is, when school started, I did
the water boy thing.
And that was cool, because they said, if I was part of the team in that aspect, I could
get weightlifting class instead of PE.
So my freshman year, I still got to continue weightlifting.
And then a bunch of my buddies tried out for the wrestling team.
And the way the wrestling team worked is, you would make the team, no matter what, you
would just be JV or a backup.
But if you wanted to be varsity, you would wrestle off for the varsity spot.
So once football season ended, wrestling season was starting.
I went into the wrestling room and just fell in love with it after the first practice,
because it was just a grind.
And I liked that it was weight class based.
It didn't matter how big or small you were, because it was all weight classes.
So I joined the wrestling team and gave up the water boy thing and never looked back
ever since.
I wrestled my whole high school career.
Same thing freshman year, I got pretty much whooped every match.
Asked the coach what I could do to improve.
And he told me, well, most kids take the season off to either play other sports or they just
take the season off.
So he's like, if you want to get really good and make up time, you just have to wrestle
all year round.
So that's what I would do during the off season.
I would go to off season tournaments and off season, what they called clinics where guys
at the higher level, whether it be college or Olympic level would go around.
And a lot of them always came to Florida just probably to make a vacation out of it.
You'd pay, they show you a bunch of different techniques and you would wrestle guys from
all over the state and just keep getting better.
So my sophomore year I came back, made the varsity team at 119 pounds.
Then my junior year, I ended up becoming a captain, wrestled at 125.
And senior year was still a captain, wrestled at 132.
And I ended up breaking the single season takedown record for that year for my school.
And my ultimate goal was obviously to be a state champion, but I fell short in that goal.
And it really taught me a lot of lessons just about life.
Because what was nice about it is when you went out on the mat, it was on you.
So if you messed something up, you kind of had to take accountability for yourself if
you lost the match.
You couldn't blame the ref and can't blame your coach.
But as far as the team aspect, you had to be a good drilling partner and you had to
have good drilling partners around you.
So kind of like the fire service, it really does parallel because you and your partner
may have to go do a single task on the fire ground to get it done.
But you're also relying on your other teammates to get their single task done.
And if you don't get that task done, it's on you.
It's nobody else's fault.
So I really enjoyed it.
And I did a little bit of jujitsu once I got out of high school.
But now I just don't have as much time as I would like now to dedicate to it.
So yeah, when we first met in the three, four, three, immediately I noticed your right ear
was slightly color-flipped.
And I'm like, he has to be a grappler at some point.
I was.
Yeah, it was interesting because I ask a lot of people that about the contrast between
the team sports and individual sports.
And I played both as well.
But you can sandbag in a team sometimes and get away with it.
There's blaming sometimes, ah, you missed the goal, whatever it was.
And this is what I loved about the individual one, which is why I leaned more towards that
is exactly like you said.
When you're on the mat and you're against that person, you either win or you lose.
And even I remember when I used to be close on points in martial arts, okay, well, that's
not good enough.
I can't let the judges decide.
I need to decide.
So I'm still not good enough.
It's still on me.
So it does definitely carry over to the fire service because yeah, when you're in South
Florida going through a collapse maze, it's 110 outside and you're halfway through the
maze for lack of a better word, no one else is coming to help you.
It's that little voice in your mind that's either going to get you to panic or to keep
pushing forward and get it done.
Yeah.
What I really liked about it too is if anybody has ever grappled before, they could also
speak to this, but it's probably one of the hardest things physically that you can do
because you're using muscles that you're not going to hit while you're in the gym, just
performing your normal compound lifts or even your isolation lifts.
And it's a huge, you know, cardiac, cardiovascular event to, you know, you're probably at 170,
180 beats a minute because you're trying to impose your will on somebody else, get them
to quit and get them to allow you to either pin them or take them down and get the points
that you need.
And the wrestling practices, I remember our coach, he would take us to the track before
practice would start.
And I mean, practice started, but we weren't in the weight, we weren't in the wrestling
room yet.
We pretty much do whatever the track teams practice was.
So we would either do run a few miles or we'd run intervals around the track and then we'd
go into the wrestling room, drill our moves for an hour or two, and then live wrestle
for an hour.
And then three, four hours after school every day, just grinding out in the wrestling room.
And then as I got older and wanted to accomplish more, I was even, you know, I was a high school
kid waking up early before school.
I'd go run three to five miles every day before school just to try to, you know, get an edge
and you know, make myself have a better chance of being successful because, you know, it's
addicting when you want to, you want to win and it's, it's you versus another person.
100%. What about career aspirations? What were you dreaming of becoming when you were
still in the school age?
So my whole life, I pretty much wanted to be a cop because I wanted to, you know, I
heard my dad's stories.
My dad was a very well respected leader in his department by his guys.
And at a young age, I even kind of caught on to that just by how they would act around
him and the things he would do for them.
Some of the stories I heard were, you know, instead of just throwing the book at him,
he would do what he could as a servant leader and make sure maybe, you know, if they were
a good guy and they just made a mistake and they were honest, you know, he would try to
help them out a little bit and not just throw the whole administrative paperwork at them.
And you know, my dad, I looked up to my dad.
I still look up to my dad now. He's 6'4", 260 pounds, you know, big guy, nothing at
all. How I'm built guys still make fun of me about that.
But yeah, that was my hero, you know, so I wanted to do what he did.
And he was especially towards the end of his career.
He was really against that.
He could see where police work was going.
You know, they didn't have body cams quite yet, but you know, he was on the job before
dash cams.
And then when the dash cams came, then, you know, the tasers came about and they could
log or they could track, you know, when a taser was deployed and he could kind of see
where not necessarily that people were being held accountable, but it was like almost over
like too much.
They're overbearing, you know, towards the end of his career, guys were getting complaints
on excessive use of force when it was something they needed to do.
But just because the citizen complains and the chiefs want to appease them or, you know,
it gets caught on camera.
So he really didn't want me to do that.
And you know, I was like, no, that's what I want to do.
And he also didn't want me to go into the military because he had served in the army.
My uncle was a Marine in Vietnam.
My uncle was like 15 to 20 years older than my dad.
And my grandpa was a World War II veteran.
So he didn't want me to go in the military.
He said enough brobergs have served the country.
And at the time, you know, we were over in the Middle East.
So he's like, I'm not raising you to go get blown up over there.
Basically is what he would tell me.
Which fair enough, I really had no aspirations to go the military route anyways.
I really just wanted to be a cop.
And he sat me down one day and said, you know, he had a buddy that was on the fire department
in Boyan.
And he said, I want you to do a ride along with my buddy Ken.
And if you don't like it after this, then you can go be a cop.
So I went and did a ride along.
I went in on a Sunday.
So I didn't know this at the time, but obviously it's typically a more chill day, you know,
for a firehouse life.
But I showed up and we, he went through the whole truck with me.
They were doing their truck check out.
And then we ate breakfast together.
We ran a couple of medical calls.
We ate lunch together.
We did a workout in the afternoon, the gym, and then I ended up going home right after
dinner.
You know, ran some calls in between, nothing crazy.
But what really attracted me to the fire service was the camaraderie and like the, just the
fact that you're part of a crew basically.
Because when I wrestled, me and my friends who wrestled together, we were all really
close.
Like we would go, we'd wrestle, you know, during the week and then we'd wrestle on
the weekends and then we'd pick somebody's house to hang out at that night.
And, you know, we spent all of our time together, almost like a crew.
And I really liked that.
And that's ultimately what attracted me to the fire service.
The fact that they could work out on duty, because I was still into fitness then too.
And that you had to be in shape for your job.
It's something different every day.
You know, it's challenging mentally and physically.
And you know, my dad even told me, he's like, when you're a cop, you're in your car for
most, you're shift by yourself.
You know, unless it's like a high crime, really busy area, like an LA, you're not, you don't
have a partner, you know, which is wrong.
I've said this with so many police officers, like we wonder why there's issues.
Yeah.
Because, you know, if either of us is walking down the street and we had to go hands on
with one person versus two, I mean, it's common sense.
There's a lot of people walking those streets that are a lot bigger or just better at fighting
than I am.
It doesn't matter if I got a badge on my chest, but the moment you have two people, two well
trained people, that's a real force multiplier.
Yep.
So I came back to my dad like, yes, this is what I want to do.
And so I signed up for EMT school, went to nighttime EMT school.
Cause I was taking some college classes during the day at the time.
Got my EMT and then that same guy, Ken, he told me that he did fire school at Wakefield
Lake Tech, which was, I had never heard of like the city to various, but it's in Lake
County.
And he said they had a program when he went through back when he started, it was like
20 years prior at the time, but it was an apprenticeship program where you can live
at a fire station and go to school.
So he called the chief up there.
It was for the Mount Dora fire department.
And I got into the fire school at Lake Tech, moved up right after I graduated high school.
And well, I should say it was the spring after I graduated high school.
Cause I had finished one semester of college.
And so I lived in Mount Dora's fire station while I went to fire school.
And that really solidified my decision.
Cause you know, during the week I'd be in fire school, I'd come back, I'd have dinner
with the crew.
And instead of driving all the way home three hours back to South Florida, I would just
hang out at the station for the weekend.
And it really helped me cause they'd helped me with my knots and whatever stuff I needed
to pass for fire school and I got to run some calls with them and really see what the lifestyle
was about.
And then I came back home and at the time it was highly competitive.
So this was probably like the summer of 2013, the tail end of the recession.
And I didn't know this, but there had been like hiring freezes for five to eight years.
So it was highly competitive to get a job, nothing like what it is now.
And applied to it, a few different processes.
I remember I did a process with Sebring's fire department and I was so naive cause you
know, I never really worked like a real job that had an interview before.
I always worked like a lifeguard job or whatever the case was.
And I know I bombed the interview, especially looking back now, but it was crazy.
It was for like, I think it was like for nine or 10 bucks an hour for a firefighter EMT,
you know, in a small Sebring in the middle of Highlands County.
And it was kind of crazy that I didn't get the job.
And so I went back home and you know, my parents were like, well, you might as well, since
you're living at home, just go to medic school.
That way you can make yourself more marketable, especially in South Florida at the time.
If you weren't a medic, you had to be like a chief son or something to get hired as a
firefighter EMT.
So what's funny is when I was looking, which was 2004, I went to mid Florida tech Orlando
and my son's mother wanted to move down to Miami, kind of pursue the whole entertainment
industry down there.
And I was told by all the instructors in Orlando, oh, you'll never get hired down South unless
you're a medic and you speak Spanish.
And I went down and the city of Hialeah was just dying for people because they, I mean,
it was still competitive, but they weren't as sought after as Miami-Dade.
They literally were being paid half what some of the cities around them were.
So I think it was three months I was hired, but it's funny that rhetoric, sometimes it's
almost discouraging for people like, oh, you'll never because it's like, well, throw your
fricking name in any way.
Don't be dissuaded by that.
Yeah.
And even the instructors at late tech, they kind of said the same thing, but they even
told us they're like, just apply everywhere.
So I went through medic school, which actually worked out very well.
I started medic school when I was 20 and then I did the, it was about a year.
I went through Palm beach state was living at home so I could just focus on medic school.
And I was also volunteering for a small department down there called a North Palm beach.
There are one station department down there and they had a volunteer program, which was
really nice because then I could do rides with them and keep my fire and EMT sort of
and it was crazy that I tell some of these young guys this now.
I feel like I'm like, not necessarily that I'm that old salty guy.
It's like, you guys don't know what it's like, but I remember I had to go to those meetings
for like, I think it was four to six months before I got on, I would go into my civilian
clothes and just stand around there and watch them do their drill because there was even
a line just to become a volunteer for them.
And the way they did it is as soon as you put your application in, they just told us
like, Hey, just come every week and you will just wait till a spot opens up.
So I finally, a couple of spots opened up.
I got in, did that for a year.
And then towards the end of medic school, I had like a month left the medic school.
I was actively testing at the end of my medic school because we were in our, they call it
our capstone, but for people who don't know is basically just doing rides.
You're not having to go to class every day.
And Kissimmee gave me my, my shot.
So I remember the training lieutenant called me and I was actually at a clinical, such
a small world.
I was at a clinical with Palm Beach County doing my ride time.
And one of the firefighter paramedics there, he had just left Kissimmee, like not that
long ago and he was at the station when I got the phone call.
So he kind of gave me the scoop on how it was up there.
And I was pretty excited because he was like, yeah, you know, they burn a pretty good amount.
They have really good equipment.
And he just said, you know, at the time they don't pay obviously what South Florida pays.
That was the only, he even said the only reason he came down to South Florida was just the
pay and he had already kind of missed some of the camaraderie and the brotherhood that
Kissimmee had.
And I remember it when he called me, the training lieutenant and I hung up the phone, the butterflies
that I had, it was like I had the golden ticket.
And I'm sure you felt the same way, you know, when you first got hired, it was very competitive.
So competitive, you know, now we're, you know, there, you see departments are hiring kids
out of high school to like put them through the fire academy and all that on and get paid
an hourly wage.
It's just, it's crazy, but it's what has to be done right now, you know, because for whatever
reason people aren't flocking to the trades as much anymore.
Well, let me, let me ask you that question before I load it and give you my opinion.
Why do you think it is that you experienced such competition when you were testing?
I mean, only 10 years ago, you know, and when we're seeing what we're seeing now, you know,
we do talk about this a lot at the station and to be honest, I really don't know.
I mean, I have my theories, but obviously I don't have enough data to back it up.
I don't know if it's more because the, the schools are pushing people to go to college
first and they're not necessarily looking at the trades.
And maybe, you know, I even brought this up in my own department.
I say, why we do these pub heads all the time.
We go to the preschools and the elementary schools to show them the truck.
And I said, why?
Because we're, we're still having recruiting issues now, but a couple of years ago when
we were having them, I said, why don't we do like what the Marines do and go to the
high school or go to some of these sports teams that are at the end of their practices
and say, Hey, you know, maybe you're not going to college for athletics, but have you guys
ever thought about a career in the fire service?
You still get to be part of a team and you can make a pretty good living wage while you're
still living at home with your parents until you get on your feet.
And, you know, I want somebody who can work in a team, has some athletic physical capabilities
and has maybe dealt with a little bit of adversity when you compete in sports.
And I think the other problem in Florida right now too, is for many, many years you had to
go get your own education before you could get hired where a lot of States, they will
do essentially like a civil service exam, hire you and then put you through a recruit
school.
So like, especially right now and now as economy, maybe you're not going to get as many people
that are willing to not make a living wage while they have to support their families
to go to school and then they're not even guaranteed a job yet.
See what's been interesting comparing and I think, cause I tested 20 plus years ago,
it was very different.
Like the internet was still kind of in its infancy then.
And I remember there was one website, it was called like the golden nuggets.com or something.
If you were going to do your, the big stumbling blocks seem to be the oral interview.
So it was all these kind of do's and don'ts to prepare you for that.
And the reality is just be yourself is what it should have said.
But that was it.
So you Google, what's it like to be a firefighter?
I joke about it all the time.
It was moustaches, the helmets and getting babies out of fires.
If you Google it now, you see not only firefighter, divorce, cancer, suicide, addiction, all the
things, but you also can pull up, you know, how much are they getting paid?
What are the actual hours?
It used to like not even be on the app.
I didn't know what I was going to get paid from Hialeah till weeks into the academy.
I shit you know.
So, so now you see it and now you learn about mandatory overtime and you've got these younger
generation that have been brought up to understand mental health, to understand physical fitness,
some of them.
And they look at this on paper and they're like, that sounds fucking awful.
You know, that the worst case that we're in at the moment.
And so this is what's exciting though, is if you fix those things.
And we were talking before we hit record about the 24 72.
If you show these young recruits that actually we're going to create an environment that
will allow you to thrive, not break you down and destroy your marriage.
I think we're going to see a U-turn back to people lining up around the building.
But I think that, you know, the dwindling amount of people that are applicable because
of the obesity crisis, but also the fact that we've done a terrible job telling people what
we actually do.
And we still walk around saying that we have this amazing shift, but we don't, you know,
I think all those have finally come to the critical mass.
And so it's less about Gen Z not wanting to work and more about them actually understanding
what's most important to them.
You know, so we did kind of went in blindly and didn't really question it.
And I think now with so many of our brothers and sisters that we've buried, this next
generation is actually coming with fresh eyes going, you know what, you need to fix these
things before we get excited to come work for you.
It's not, they don't have service in their horror, but they're also prioritizing their
health and their relationships, which I think is brilliant.
So they're forcing us to change.
Yeah, a hundred percent.
And I agree with you.
I think we do a very bad job of explaining the real expectations of what the job is like
to these younger people.
They think that we just cut cars and fight fire every day.
And I'm an instructor at the Academy as well, and I'm straight up with them.
I said, you're probably going to run four to five calls after midnight and they're most
likely going to be medicals or non-emergency type calls.
And if you are not prepared for that, like this may not be the job for you.
You know, it's 80, it's pretty much 80%, you know, medical and maybe five to 10% extrications,
five to 10% fires, if that.
And I'm not discrediting, like, you know, especially in our city, we do still fight
fire and you still have to be prepared for those types of things.
But I think the expectation on the majority of the calls you're going to run every day
is you need to be upfront.
Because I have also noticed that these younger employees of the departments are starting
to complain about the calls a lot sooner than they really should be.
You know, and I have a year or two guy complaining about having to go pick grandma up off the
ground.
It's like, dude, what did you, what do you think we do?
Like, they don't have anybody else to call.
They can't call the cops, right?
They can't call the garbage man.
They can't call the electrician.
They got to call us.
And I do try to do a good job of that and outlining it for these recruits.
And then it's up to the crews on the department to kind of, you know, keep the culture going,
which I think has also been a, I think it's always been an issue, but it's an issue in
a lot of departments, you know, you can't control where some of these recruits end up.
And then they, sometimes you could have somebody that has a really good attitude and really
wants to do a good job.
And then they just get kind of stepped on and then they get ruined.
Yeah.
I remember my last place, um, multiple people said, Oh, you wait, they'll break you down.
And I was like, how sad is that?
That's terrible.
That's the narrative in this place, you know, and I get it.
I see it.
And they did.
I didn't, they didn't, let me rephrase that.
There was that element.
I didn't allow it to adjust my, you know, my direction.
But I mean, in the end, I just decided to step out of that department and try and be
the solution from the outside.
But, but yeah, that is the ethos is that they'll break you down.
And that shouldn't be, you know, if you go to the NFL locker room and they go to the
quarterback, Oh, you just, you wait, they'll break you down.
Like no one would stand for that.
You know, but why is that the norm for police or fire?
It's insane.
So what about, um, the fitness side?
You came from this, you know, athlete background as a wrestler.
What were the standards at the front doors of some of these departments?
And then how did you start to become, you know, someone who was a kind of leader when
it came to firefighter fitness?
So yeah, I've always been into fitness, especially I was always smaller statured and I looked
at somebody like my dad who was bigger.
So I always wanted to be bigger, especially when I got on the fire department.
Um, at first I had really good cardio because I had wrestled all through high school, was
running all the time.
And then, um, some of my arrogance was like, well, since I've done that for so long, I
don't need to do any more cardio at all.
I just want to look good and get big.
Cause that's what being a firefighter is.
And you just have to be big to get the job done.
So I was only doing lifting and you know, the bro, the bro workouts, you know, the vanity
muscles and stuff like that.
And once I had a couple of years on the job, um, on a couple of fires, I had just really
not performed to what I should have been performing to.
And so I changed my training up, especially because, um, I had found out about some smoke
diver programs and decided to go to the Georgia smoke diver program in 2017.
So at the time I had, uh, it's like a hard in 2012.
So I had like four, maybe four years on and I'd never really been pushed like that.
And so I was unsuccessful.
I actually failed out within the first 30 minutes of the first PT session of the program.
What was it that, what was the, the deficit in your preparation and what was the movement
that you failed on?
So surprisingly I actually, so the, the way they do it for, if you're an out of stator
is they let you come take the, the entrance test the day before.
So that way you don't have to fly or drive up there beforehand.
I passed that, but, um, what actually got me, believe it or not, was just body weight,
calisthenics and holds like something that I didn't really put a lot of stock in.
Cause I was like, Oh, I wrestled, I'll be fine.
I've done pushups and, and jumping jacks before.
And you know, I, towards the end of the PT session, I couldn't even hold a pushup anymore.
So they just told me stand up, you're done.
You know, you're not even meeting the standard anymore.
So a huge slice of humble pie.
I remember we did an accident interview with one of the ops chiefs cause they run the,
they run an incident command system within the program.
It's actually very impressive how highly organized they are.
And um, that chief was like, yeah, I used to, when I got prepped for the program, I
would ride my bike or run to the gym, do my workout and then come back.
And the light bulb kind of went off.
It's like, you gotta do a little more than, you know, just doing a workout.
You got to kind of stack it on.
And then shortly after that, I met a really big mentor of mine, Matt McGee.
He's currently a lieutenant for Orlando, but he was a fireman at the time.
And he had gone through smoke diver Florida's program three times.
So he kind of gave me his whole plan on what he did to prepare.
And he also invited me to work out with them one day at his station.
And I've told this story a few times, but we did like a coat and pants workout because
it was so hot that day.
I remember we did this, it was like a five round workout.
It had tire hits, tire flips, stuff that you would see in like a normal firefighter type
of course.
And by round three, I had to like take my stuff off and he wasn't even phased.
So it just kind of like, it made me realize I wasn't where I needed to be.
And training in gear is completely different than actually just being, having a general
physical fitness or physical preparedness because, and there are studies out there that
prove this, you could be a high level crossfit athlete, but if you put them in gear and have
them do any type of firefighter type movements, it's much different.
And they're probably going to even struggle as well.
But there's a little curve there that if they, the more they do it, the more acclimated they'll
get.
And the more fit you are, the easier it is to acclimate is what I'm trying to say.
But if you don't do it at all and you are a firefighter, you're really doing yourself
a disservice because it's a completely different environment, especially if you are in a state
that is hot or hot and humid, because the humidity plays a huge factor as well.
It's fucking brutal here.
Yeah.
There's no question about it.
Yeah.
I try to explain it to some people who aren't from here.
I just tell them like, you could walk outside and take your trash out and you're already
sweating.
And we were talking about the other day, I said the summer actually felt better this
year.
It was hot.
Don't get me wrong.
It was really hot.
I've been getting a lot of rain lately.
It's not quite as hot.
You know, it's in the mid to high eighties, but it feels worse because of how high the
humidity is.
Like you look at the weather, the humidity is like 87%.
And it's like completely different than if it was just hot in the summer.
Don't get me wrong.
The heat index in the summer was like probably 102, 105, but it was just the humidity makes
it way worse.
It's crazy.
Yeah.
I got to experience both because I worked for Anaheim, California for a few years and every
time I did my Bloomin orientation or Academy, it was always the summer.
And so you're out there and yeah, it's just kind of like, you know, like you're standing
in front of an oven, but it is that dry heat, you know?
And so you get that evaporation when you sweat here.
It's like sweating in a swimming pool.
You're not actually really cooling.
And then obviously you put your gear on, which is designed not to let anything out.
Just yeah, I mean, that's the one thing.
And I did okay when I was on the job, but I noticed that that was the one of the things
that I started losing when I got older as a firefighter is your ability to acclimatize
seemed to diminish.
And I would do Murph in gear and towards the end, and especially when I transitioned out
where my wire wasn't strong to be in gear anymore, you know, I felt that my organs were
literally cooking.
Like I could do the movements, like all of them, the pushups, I've always kind of struggled
with, you know, multiple pushups.
But the pull-ups and the squats and the runs are always fine, but it was the heat.
Same with the stair climbs, you know, trying to get ready when I did, when I was prepping
for the smoke diver here before I tore my meniscus, I was doing, you know, all the gear
and we had a 28 story hotel next to my station in my last place.
And we were doing the, you know, the 110 story climb on air and everything.
And it wasn't the exertion.
It was the heat.
And that's like you said, that's a hard thing to control because you either you can or you
can't at the end of the day.
Yeah.
And some of it does come down to mental resiliency because, you know, since I started my page
rogue firemanship, I get questions all the time related to smoke diver stuff.
And it seems like the number one question I get is like, what type of workout should
I be doing?
And it's very hard because everybody's different.
Everybody has their own strengths and weaknesses.
So, you know, you may be an endurance athlete, so you don't necessarily need to do as many
endurance workouts.
Maybe we just need to focus on some strength and still get you in gear and, you know, vice
versa.
But the main thing I tell them is there's really never too much you can do to prepare
for a program like that.
Everybody's going to get to a point where they hit a wall and it's going to be up to
you to decide whether you want to keep going or not.
And it doesn't matter how fit you are.
Everybody's going to hit that wall.
Now, Greg, everybody may hit it at different levels.
You don't want to hit that level like I did the first time I went at 30 minutes into the
program.
But you just have to make the conscious decision that you have to compartmentalize what you're
going through and just break it down to one step at a time or a couple feet at a time.
If you're doing a search evolution or if you're dragging a dummy out, like, all right, let
me just get 10 more feet and then I can stop or I'm not stopping until I at least get to
the door, stuff like that.
And you do that through your training.
You have to do training that is going to push you.
And these 10 minute and wraps, 15 minute and wraps like CrossFit is designed for, isn't
necessarily going to get you there.
It's definitely a tool in the toolbox.
But I tell people you have to be able to be in your gear.
If you seriously want to go through a program like that, you have to be able to.
Always be in your gear for an hour, somewhat comfortably.
Now, I'm not going to lie to you.
Once I hit the 40, 50, 60 minute mark, like I have to dig deep to keep going.
But if you just do a 20 minute gear workout and that's all you do for that day or for
the week, that's not going to be enough to get you through.
What do you tell people as far as the to be in gear to not be in gear?
I'm literally about to interview Diane Carter, who she lost her husband to cancer and she
was one of the first people to be talking about P-Fest in our gear.
And it's a completely legitimate conversation, of course.
But at the same time, the other part of it is that we have to be in gear sometimes until
they figure out getting all that stuff out.
There's a kind of happy medium there.
So I've talked to Jon Spur about this and some other people that are known to work out
in their gear.
What is your response about do, don't or a middle ground?
So the first thing I'll say is I'm not 100% expert on the P-Fest.
I've done a little bit of research and from my perspective, it's very hard to know what
to believe because you have one person saying that it can get absorbed through the skin
and then you have another scientist saying that maybe not necessarily it may be a molecule
too big.
So we don't know for sure.
And secondly, there are definitely resources out there that if you're not comfortable wearing
gear to work out in that there's one company I've seen recently, they're starting to gain
traction.
It's called Karna Bunker Gear.
It's a guy who saw that as a problem and he created P-Fest free training bunker gear.
So it's obviously not bunker gear you can go into an IDOH with.
But if you want to just train in it and get acclimated to the heat, he actually made it
to where it's almost a little hotter than normal bunker gear because it's not letting
the heat out.
And then the third thing I would say is this is me personally, this is not the department
I work for speaking, this is me.
It's an inherited risk that we may or may not have to accept.
And my priority is being able to operate at a high level on the fire ground when I may
need to.
And to do that, you have to train in your gear.
And what I will say though is there's no excuse for training in dirty gear.
And by dirty, I mean any gear that's been in a structure fire.
So make sure if you go into a fire, I'm very lucky the department I work at, we have two
sets of gear minimum.
So when we come back from the fire, I throw my dirty set in the extractor.
All of our stations have extractors.
I wash it immediately.
I switch into my second set of gear and they let us be out of service so we can shower
and decon and clean all of our stuff off.
I think that's, to me, I think that's more important than necessarily the PFAS conversation.
And also from my research, there's PFAS and everything.
I'm more worried about what am I drinking, what I'm eating.
I think some of that stuff is probably going to kill us more than the PFAS.
But like I said, I'm no expert.
It's a risk that I'm willing to take because I don't want to be able to be on a call where
I know I could have pushed a little harder if I was acclimated to my gear and more comfortable
in it versus not.
Now I'm second guessing my performance.
Because like I said earlier in this conversation, you could do all the crossfit and weightlifting
workouts you want.
It still doesn't necessarily prepare you for the demands of being in your gear.
Yeah, 100%.
Yeah, well, it's interesting.
I had a guy, Rob Belot, who was the lawyer, the real lawyer from the Dark Waters movie
where they exposed, I think it was DuPont and that's where this all came from.
And yeah, apparently, pretty much all of us have PFAS in us already, sadly, because of
contaminated water and everything else.
But when a lot of that started being a conversation of fire service, what I saw was a lot of finger
pointing like, oh, this is where cancer is coming from.
And my whole thing was, all right, so you're not going to talk about a much more powerful
known carcinogen, which is sleep deprivation.
So you're going to point your finger over here, but you're not going to look in the
mirror and say, we're also probably far more likely causing cancer to our people by these
crazy work weeks and this mandatory overtime.
So that's what kind of sickened me.
Of course, you want to minimize every element that's going to be detrimental.
But if you put on a table, which is more important, the PFAS or the sleep deprivation, sleep deprivation
is the first thing we've got to address.
Doesn't mean you can't simultaneously get gear that doesn't have it in.
But I mean, your AFFF has it in.
I mean, there's a lot of other things that does.
But yeah, if you're going to stand on a podium all of a sudden, because you get to point
to someone else rather than to your own department, that's why I think it took off so much.
They got to blame someone else rather than take ownership.
Yeah, that's what I always would scratch my head about too, because even before the talk
of changing schedules, I'd say probably like five years ago, the last three to five years,
the cancer thing has been a big, big deal.
And they've been talking about how dirty gear was causing cancer, which I don't discredit
100%.
But if you look at the statistics, other than the old firemen and the warriors where they
didn't have SCBAs and where they were really burning pretty much every day in multiple
fires a day, we fast forward to now, the statistics show that we are not burning as much, but
the cancer rates are still at the same level, maybe a little higher.
It's probably not the fires we're going to.
That was the thing I always said, I said it's the sleep deprivation.
It's the shift work, which is known as a, I forgot what class and what type it is, but
it's known as a carcinogen, like you said.
And that is something else that we can control when some departments are at least being proactive
and trying to do that.
And it was kind of like the whole, I laughed too, because when the clean cab concept came
out, it was such a knee jerk reaction, they were like, let's just move the SCBAs and the
gear outside of the cab of the truck.
And it's like, if it's all clean, then how is it off gassing and getting people sick?
You know, like people, people don't understand that the clean cab concept also stated that
you needed to have extractors at every station, two sets of gear, and you need to decon right
after a fire.
The, the stuff outside the cab was just another thing you could do, but it wasn't necessary.
It wasn't a thing you had to do.
And I think a department down south, I can't remember if it was Miami day, but it was a
big department.
They actually came out, they went clean cab and then a short time later, they actually
issued a statement and said, we're no longer doing that.
That was a bad idea.
We're going to do two sets of gear and all that stuff.
See, a lot of the, I had the guys that were actually the Swedish firefighters that created
the clean cab, you know, the, the Schleffer model, I think they call it.
And it was really interesting to hear, but when you start hearing this, this, again,
the pendulum swings and you get this epic pushback and then you hear clean cabs save
grabs like you're going to just jump heroically off the rig and just fly into a building without
taking any time to size it up.
And you know, I was a tiller man in California or you can't put your pack in the doghouse.
It has to be down there.
And when you do that, you realize that it takes seconds to sling it over your shoulders
and then, you know, throw your mask on and click in.
Meanwhile, your LT is telling you what they want to do or captain in that case, or you're,
you know, just simply sizing it up or, you know, you're the person who was in the cab
is going to obviously be ready a little bit closer than you are or a little bit sooner.
They're grabbing a tool and handing it to you, whatever it is, you've got that moment.
So I actually like the idea of the cab being out because I lived it.
And also if you think about it, when, when you're on the way to a call, when is it that
you're not wearing your seatbelt?
So when you're fucking around with your SCBA, if you get into a wreck, what's happening
and that thing is slamming into your bag.
You know, I mean, you're getting hung up on all the, you know, the headphone cables and
all that stuff.
So I actually like the packs being on the outside, you know, now that, you know, like
you said, if you've got an extracted clean set of gear, of course that could be in the,
in the cab if it's clean, it's supposed to be clean, it's clean.
But the pack itself, if you think about it, if you had a normal seat, you stepped off,
opened a compartment, slung that thing around while, you know, you're surveying the scene
or waiting for instructions and you're just, just taking it all in, it's seconds.
It's absolutely just seconds.
And no one, no one in their right mind is going to leap off a fire engine and go straight
into a building.
So there's also that fallacy with the pushback on the clean cab, because it doesn't mean
it's supposed to be a surgical room, you know, it's just removing some of those, those things
that are detrimental.
And then the pack is so hard to truly decontaminate.
You can't put a pack in an extractor, you know?
So if you got the special machines and yeah, but a lot of times we're still just hosing
and scrubbing those.
So I'm personally for keeping those outside specifically.
Yeah, it's no different than like, you know, we run, we call them rescues, but they're
ambulances in my city and that's where their packs are.
They're in a compartment with tools in the tick.
And you know, I'm currently a driver, but lately I've been riding up as officer and
same thing, like you said, it's no different.
I have to, I don't have tools up in the front seat with me either.
So I have to get out, get my tools.
And sure, I don't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be opposed to having an air pack on the outside,
but I want my gear to be able to be in the truck and I can get it on while we're in the
bay while I'm looking at the notes, hopping the truck, put my seatbelt on and go to the
call.
I don't want to have to get off the truck and put my bunker gear on.
Then my air pack as I have to then go and size the building up, do a 360.
God forbid there's somebody trapped.
You know, it's just one less thing that I would like to have to worry about the air
pack.
I mean, it's a real deal, but the whole clean captain, there was everything outside.
Yeah.
No, I think this is it.
You know, what works for one place doesn't mean that you have to do it exactly right.
But the principle is as much of that shit out as you can, if it makes sense.
Um, you, we talked about, you know, the, the humility that you had as far as realizing
you had weaknesses, um, with the first attempt for Georgia smoke diver.
So talk to me about how your training shifted and then the success, excuse me, the success
through the program.
Yeah.
So it was a pretty, uh, long journey.
So in 2017 went through George's program.
Obviously didn't make it through.
I came back, um, slowly started changing my training style, started doing more stuff in
gear and, uh, you know, doing more like circuit training, longer circuits as well.
Then I met Matt and he kind of showed me what the next level was.
And he took me under his wing and, you know, I would meet with him some mornings before
shift to do either a nine 11, start a climb, which, you know, how physically demanding
those are and, uh, you know, or whatever workout he wanted to do for the day.
And I liked really training with them because he would never tell me what the workout was
beforehand like until I got there and I was nice.
And I joke with them sometimes because I would tell them, I went and sleep the night before
some mornings before the workout.
Cause I was like, just anxious about what he is going to put me through.
Cause they were that, they were that bad.
And so we fast forward to December of 2018.
Um, I didn't get into the Georgia program that time they run two programs a year.
They run it in the spring and the fall, typically as an out of state candidate.
Um, I applied, I didn't get in for whatever reason.
And uh, so he made some phone calls and he got me into the Florida program, which was
running that December.
And so I go and I wasn't quite training as hard as I needed to, but I didn't know that
I thought I was doing everything I needed to do, but it's one of those things you don't
know what you don't know.
So I went to Florida and I remember that first day was just like a kick in the teeth, made
it through the first day.
And um, so I wasn't really aware of how to properly eat and hydrate for a program like
that.
And at the time I was kind of, I wouldn't say I was trained this way, but most people,
I think when they do a hard workout, they kind of lose their appetite.
Right?
So it wasn't eating nearly enough because I wasn't hungry.
I didn't bring stuff with me that I could just like chug to get calories in.
And I had no idea about electrolytes.
So I'm just, they're telling us, keep drinking water, drink water, drink water.
You guys should be pissing every five minutes, you know, like, which is true.
Like you should be hydrating.
So I make it through the first day.
Uh, I was kind of cramping up that night.
Was very uncomfortable.
Make it to the next day.
And that morning during one of the PT sessions, we were doing a barricade workout and I just
had like a full body cramp and it was one of the worst, I'm already a cramper and a
sweater, but this was one of the worst cramps I'd ever had because my whole abdominal and
my hip flexors and quads, I cramped up at the same time.
That's a shitty position to cramp in.
And that's like an angry croissant at that point.
Yeah.
So I basically like, you know, I squirmed around and I'm like on my back and laid out
and, uh, two of the cadre members, uh, they, they kind of stood over.
And it was, uh, Basil and another guy named Russ.
And they just stood over me.
They didn't yell.
They were pretty calm.
And I just stood over me and they're like, Hey man, you can either get up and keep going
and win, or you could just quit, but you gotta decide now.
And I'm in, I'm still locked up.
So I roll over, I bear crawl till like, till we finished till they told us to stop.
And to that point, that was at that point in my life and in my physical, in my, you
know, physical preparedness and fitness, that was the most I'd ever been pushed.
And so that was kind of a little bit of a win for me.
Got through that, finished the day out.
Um, we did some skills cause they, regardless to, uh, contrary to popular belief, like they
do teach you stuff in smoke divers.
Some people think that you just get your ass beat the whole week.
Like it's not like that at all.
They teach you a lot of stuff.
And uh, that night during the burn, um, I just didn't have enough in the gas tank.
So I failed out on the burn and then, uh, took a, you know, went home, took a long hard
look in the mirror, asked Matt what I needed to do.
And Matt was like, you just need to train harder.
And so spent a whole year again, training with him, went back to Florida again.
Cause after, at that point, I kinda, because Florida was so close, you know, it's right
here in Ocala.
I live in Claremont.
It's only an hour drive versus the nine hour drive to Dalton for Georgia's program.
At that point, I was like, I just want to be a Florida smoke diver because I'm from
Florida and it's not being lazy, but it was just more convenient for me to drive an hour
versus nine to 10 hours.
So didn't apply any more to the Georgia program.
My sole focus was on Florida came back again that next year took a whole nother year to
train and I made it all the way to the final evolution and came up short and without giving
it away too much.
I mean, it's not too much of a secret, but it's essentially a search evolution where
you end up finding your poker chip.
And but they tell you if you miss searchable space or you miss a victim, you have to repeat
wherever you were searching.
And they got to a point where I was so gassed that I started making some mental mistakes,
kept having to repeat my searches.
And before I knew it, I was searching for over two hours and they finally had to tell
me to stop and pull me out because even the one guy who runs it, he was like, dude, I
thought you were just going to like you were trying to kill yourself.
But I did, I had that mindset because I knew I was so close that I was just going to keep
going because you know, I was so close.
And I, at that point, you know, two and a half, three years of training, like I'm going
for it.
And they weigh us before and after that evolution and they had me get assessed by the medic
on on site there.
He had me step on the scale.
I think I had lost either like 12 or 14 pounds of water just in that evolution.
I remember I was the most thirsty I had ever been.
Like I had the worst cotton mouth.
I kept telling myself like, dude, you just get through this.
They'll give you a bottle of water.
Then you get to go search for your chip.
Like we're almost there, you know, and they just kept getting further and further away.
And did I remember I just like when they pulled me out and not a lot of people know this,
but I was just bawling my eyes out because you know, I never I never pushed myself that
far and then it was kind of like the Rolodex kind of played in my head.
I was walking down the stairs of just like all the all the sacrifices and training sessions
and all that.
It was just like is a weird moment, you know, and it's kind of funny looking back at this,
you know, one of the cadre guys, he came up to me right after, you know, I just pulled
my shit off.
I'm on the ground in the bay sitting down, you know, still crying.
He said, hey, man, you come back next year.
And I just looked at him, you know, and I'm like, no, I'm not fucking coming back next
year.
I just sacrificed three years of my life for this, you know, and in the moment, like, you
know, at that time, I was like, no, I'm not coming back.
But as soon as I drove home and got home and put in my driveway, it was like, I'm coming
back.
Yeah, I just it's just funny.
I look back now and it is like, you know, it's kind of like the cycles of grief almost,
you know, so I was kind of like in the angry phase at that point.
And so same thing, man, I took a whole nother year to train and and I was even training
with Matt even more like I was going probably once or twice a week to meet with Matt before
shift or on just depending on our schedule.
He always had a workout early in the morning because he's a busy guy and he's just
He's a realtor and he's, you know, got kids and he's a very good father and family man.
And that's the most important to him.
So all his training gets done in the morning, like before the sun's up.
So there are some mornings I have to wake up at 330 a.m. to go drive an hour to meet
him where he was at and work out.
But I went and trade that for the world.
And he's one of my best friends and one of my biggest mentors.
And, you know, when you when you suffer with other people is when you bond.
But went back again and this was my third attempt at Florida, fourth attempt overall
at a smoke diver program, made it to the night before the final scenario and came up short
and that burn.
So you know, it was a hard pill to swallow.
But and even even the cadre and Matt, well, I do that was the strongest you've ever looked,
you know, and it got to the point where, you know, obviously I wanted to be successful.
But every year I went back, dude, I got better.
Like I became a better fireman.
I became a better leader.
I was bringing people up around me because whatever crew I was on, I was training and
I would be able to get them to join me by my various methods that either turn it into
a competition or, you know, I would I would force me to get down on somebody's level instead
of thinking I was superior to them, of meeting them where they were at and being able to
motivate and and and get them to be better as well.
And that was also rewarding because it got to the point where like some of my buddies
at the department are like, dude, how are you going to these crews and and getting people
to work out in gear with you?
You know, it's like, well, one, I'm doing I'm doing it.
I'm leading by example and two, I'm not an asshole about it.
Whereas earlier in my career, before I went to smoke, I tell people this all the time.
I was an arrogant little prick.
Like I was the type of guy that, you know, if you didn't train or you didn't do stuff
extra, like you were a piece of shit.
And now that I'm older and wiser, that's you know, I know that's not the case.
People have families, they have other jobs like, you know, just because you may think
they're a piece of shit at the station.
Does that mean they're a piece of shit husband?
Are they a piece of shit father?
Probably not.
You know, like we have to learn to show some empathy and humanity, I think, you know, and
it and people are going through things you don't even know about.
But so fast forward to two years ago was my last attempt at Florida.
Same thing was the strongest I ever been.
And I got sick with the flu the night before.
I remember I went to dinner.
I had dinner with Tony Gillen.
Okay, I'm really good friends with him.
And whenever I'm up here, you know, I try to see him.
And so I had dinner with him.
And I remember I told him, I'm like, dude, I feel like shit right now.
I was congested, had stuffy nose.
I didn't sleep the whole night before the class because I couldn't breathe.
And I ended up making it two days through the program before I finally I found out on
the first burn.
And but I got a lot out of that because with me being dog sick like that, I had never pushed
myself that far.
And I was supposed to go last.
Well, so I was sick.
Didn't make it was I was a little upset and heartbroken about that because sometimes you
get unlucky.
And, you know, a whole year of training just to get sick kind of felt like I was a little
robbed and you know, I remember earlier that year, me and my wife had a miscarriage.
And the baby that we would have had was supposed to be born the week of smoke diver.
And so I kind of my way of dealing with some of the grief was I just kept training even
harder.
And I'm a I'm a big believer in like, you know, things are supposed to are meant to
be are meant to be.
And the fact that the baby wasn't born wasn't gonna be born that week.
I thought, well, maybe it's God saying like, hey, this is your time to be a smoke diver.
You know, you've been putting in a lot of time.
You know, sadly, you know, we're still we still grieve that we lost the baby.
It was very hard time.
My wife took it very hard.
But me personally, the way I I dealt with the grief is I just focused more into my training.
And that's what helped me.
So that was kind of hard.
And I kind of got home and told my wife, Lindsay, like, you know, I think I'm just done with
this smoke diver thing.
Like, it's it's not meant to be.
I've been training at it for, you know, that was my fifth attempt overall, you know, almost
five years of hard training.
Like, you know, it is what it is.
And then I kind of forgot that I was on alternate list for Georgia and like a week or two later,
they emailed saying it was a spot open.
So I put my name in like, hey, I'm interested.
And they're like, oh, you were one of the first ones to reply.
So you're in.
So less than four weeks later after that Florida program, I went to Georgia and was ultimately
successful.
And my wife, it was funny, I FaceTimed her the night before the final and the final day.
It was like, hey, you know, I made it to the final day, feeling pretty good.
And she's in our kitchen like, oh, man, it's great.
And I go through the final day, go through the final scenario.
I I'm in there with the current smoke daddy, Casto, and then Chief Rhodes is also there.
Chief Rhodes shakes my hand, gives me a challenge coin.
And he says, you know, before you before you walk through that door and become a smoke
diver, you have to do one final search of this room.
As part of that, I was searching for my nuts and bolts.
And my wife is pretty small in stature.
You know, she's like 410, 411.
And she steps to the side and she's standing right behind him.
And I remember just like immediately breaking down and I hugged her and luckily I have some
pictures of it and video.
And I just remember telling her like, thank you for putting up with all my training for
these for all these years.
And it was it was pretty nice to have all that training finally have a little bit of
an exclamation point at the end of it.
I hate to say that getting a patch or a coin, it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things,
but it is nice when you are successful and finally see things through.
Yeah, that's amazing.
Yeah, I had Chief Rhodes on the show, Todd Edwards, some of the Georgia guys.
And then I had obviously multiple people from Florida as well.
And they do sound like two slightly different programs.
So with all that preparation, chasing the Florida one, how prepared did you feel for
the Georgia one in the end?
So I felt very prepared, at least physically and a little bit mentally, because you know,
I had been pushed pretty hard before.
So when it started to get hard in the Georgia program, it wasn't an unfamiliar feeling.
Because I get the question all the time, people ask me, oh, what's which one is easier?
And I don't really feel comfortable saying one is easier than the other, because they're
just different.
The one thing I will say, though, is that Georgia, you have more opportunities if you
mess something up to redeem yourself versus the way that the Florida program is laid out,
because you're basically burning every single day and you have a high chance of if you're
not going to make the objective, it's going to be probably during a burn, that you're
not going back in to redeem yourself because you're getting pulled out and it's bad.
You're already set of smoke.
They're not putting you back in another burn.
There's no way because of how hot it is.
So that's the only difference.
But I would say both programs more or less teach the same things.
It's just a different structure and it's organized a little differently.
But I tell people all the time, if you're interested or thinking about going, you should,
because they do teach you things and you're not.
The problem, I shouldn't say the problem, but when you go to conferences or you go to
a class and you're learning a skill and then you do a scenario later that day to practice
that skill, it's still valuable and it's still good.
But it's not the same as when you're super smoked and super tired.
And Chief Rhodes has even said this multiple times for the Georgia program.
It's about day three is where people are getting what they came for.
All the evolutions and the scenarios you do in a smoke diver program are extremely basic,
but they're trying to get you to the point where you're extremely exhausted and fatigued
to where now you're having to make multiple decisions under stress and then still be successful
is where you're getting what you came for.
Yeah.
It's like that one phrase.
I think they think it was customado, wasn't it?
Tyson's trainer that originally said it.
Everyone has a plan till they get hit in the face.
Yeah, exactly.
Absolutely.
What about then mentally, you finally, I mean, that's such a crucible.
I've had people on here, Julian Serrano, some other ones that obviously didn't make it the
first time, but no one has had that five year, six try journey that you've had.
You finally get there.
What are those weeks and months like for you later when that thing that you've been chasing
for so long has finally been achieved?
Yes, I would say mentally I was on a high for probably like, I'd say a month.
I was pretty stoked.
I was still training though, like as soon as I got back, I was still in gear and training.
And then once that high kind of wore off, I was looking at Florida again.
It's kind of just, I think a lot of people don't understand it.
Even some people in my family, they had made the comment like, well, you're already a smoke
diver.
Like why you need to go to Florida?
And for me, it's just unfinished business.
I was always raised by my hardworking parents.
Like you don't quit anything and you see it through till it's done.
And also another part of it is I've gained a lot of friends and relationships from going
to Florida so many times and those guys making it through that I just want to be part of
the club, man.
Not that they don't accept me now that I'm not a Florida smoke diver, but it is different
when you get to be on the other side.
Especially when you got so close so many times.
Yeah, exactly.
And I've talked to Basil about this before too, and he even agrees that luck does play
a little bit into it and it does suck when you're a little unlucky.
But that's the other thing, I know I'm capable of doing it and honestly, I just enjoy the
training leading up to it.
And I enjoy the program because you're not getting that type of training anywhere else.
When I do training at the department, like I said, you're always fresh or it's the same
training that you've been doing the last three years in the same burn building that you're
not getting stimulus out of that.
So I was supposed to go last January, but I had a pretty significant back injury, which
that was a whole nother round of adversity that I had to get through.
How did you get through that?
Did you have to have surgery or did you manage to PT?
So luckily I didn't need surgery.
I don't know exactly what did it, but I started having some pain in my back and it started
kind of like in the lower right side where your, where your glute kind of meets the lower
back.
And I was not really paying too much attention to it because I had strained my back before
and it kind of felt similar to that.
But then as time went on and I kept training, I kept the pain kept traveling down lower
and lower.
And then finally I would just woke up one morning after doing a pretty hard workout
the day before and I woke up, I felt a little bit of pain.
I took a hot shower.
That didn't really help.
So I took my massage gun and I massaged the back of my, where the pain was.
And when I did that, it like was like an explosion went off in my back and it was 10 out of 10
pain.
I was on the floor and it was the worst pain I'd ever felt in my life.
And I crawled to the bed, try to get in the bed to get comfortable and nothing was working
to alleviate the pain.
And luckily I had some leftover painkillers from my nasal surgery that I had a few months
prior.
I took one of those and about 30 minutes in it barely masked the pain.
Like it just made it somewhat more to where I wasn't squirming around in the bed.
And what ended up happening is I had an L5 S1 disc herniation that was impinging the
sciatic nerve.
And so sitting was like the worst and then driving to work was even more painful just
because of that like nerve floss where my foot was on the, it was my right side.
So my foot was on the gas pedal.
And so I had to call out of, I called out of work for like two shifts and I finally
got to the pain to where it was tolerable, but I could barely bend down and touch my
knee and I was pretty much just like limping into work, told my Lou like, Hey, look, if
we have to pick somebody up off the ground, there's not much I can do.
I said, I can throw a ladder.
I was driving at the time.
So I was like, I'll, I'll hump some hoes and throw a ladder.
But you know, and eventually it started feeling a little better, but not to the point where
I could work out.
So I went and saw a spine surgeon and so he sent me to get an MRI, came back and he said,
you don't need surgery luckily, but he said he recommended steroid injections.
And so I did my research on the, I think it's like a corticosteroid and I really did not
like the results I was seeing on that.
I was seeing a lot of people would have to go back for multiple injections and that I
was reading online, the multiple injections can actually lead to degeneration.
So I didn't like that at all.
I kind of Googled like, you know, what else can you do for a back injury and a clinic
over in Winter Park called Regenexx popped up and they offered PRP injections.
So I went there and I really liked the doctor there.
His name was Dr. Torrance.
He actually bounces between the Tampa, St. Pete and Winter Park area because he's a specialist
for the spine.
But I wrote, what I really liked about him is he was very fit and he was like a cross
fitter.
So he knew exactly kind of what I was going through.
You know, I was, I want to say I was depressed, but I was slightly depressed because I couldn't
work out anymore.
You know, gained some weight was pretty much stuck on the couch on my days off.
And so he recommended the injections.
I got those the first week of January.
And he pretty much said like, Hey, it'll take about 16 weeks before you're like back to
a hundred percent.
And within like two to three weeks, I started noticing results.
I went to physical therapy, which I was a little disappointed in the physical therapy.
It was kind of a joke.
I hate to say it, but once I went there a few times, I told him, I'm like, just give
me the, give me the plan and give me the exercises.
I'll just do this at home because I have a full garage gym at home.
And so I did that.
It didn't, it helped a little bit, but not as much as I wanted.
It was really just the time is what I needed to heal and no shit.
Like he said around the 16 week mark, I finally woke up in the morning with no pain because
it's, as the time went on, I was getting less pain.
Like the more I moved around, it wouldn't feel bad during the day, but the morning would
be bad.
So I was pretty much taking Tylenol like every day.
I mean, I was taking Tylenol around the clock, like thousand milligrams at a time to the
point where I finally got to that 16 week mark, didn't have any more pain at all.
And now I'm like, you know, I'm almost 10 months post that injection.
I'm pretty much back to a hundred percent.
I mean, I think he saw me competing at the three, four to three and gave me no issues
other than just being able to go sore the next, you know, that night and the next day.
Brilliant.
I know talk to me about foundation training too, cause I did that.
When I hurt my back, it was, God, we must be at least I think 10 years ago.
And that was, was incredible for, for healing.
So did you incorporate that during that time?
Yeah, I was doing that like once a week because Sparrow had sent me a video that he shares
with his Patreon community.
Like once a week, they have a free YouTube, but I think it's like a 10 minute.
Yeah.
12 minute foundation.
Yeah.
Like a weekly thing.
And that helped a lot too.
And just, you know, as I get older now, I realize I have to actually warm up before
workout and stretch and not be as hardheaded and listen to my body more.
Cause before I was like, I just, you know, I got to stack it all and I got to just keep
pushing through.
And now I'm a little more intentional with my training and I pay a lot more attention
to my body because if I get, I realized, you know, I pushed myself that one day and maybe
if I would have just backed off for a few weeks, I would have probably been fine to
go to Florida and not, I mean, I couldn't work out for almost two months.
So you know, it's kind of like a, in hindsight, it's always 2020, but it's like, okay, I could
have just maybe backed off a little bit and still kept my physical fitness to where it
was and, and continue to gradually get better versus I took off almost two months, which
I got it back pretty a lot quicker than I thought.
But I mean, the first few weeks of getting back into it kind of sucked, especially like
the first few runs I did.
It was like my calves had never known what running was ever.
Well, I think as I've got older, I realized that that whole less is more, is really a
real thing, especially as you are aging as well, you can, you know, destroy yourself
when you're young and get away with it.
But if you look at the martial arts community, they're doing a lot less full contact sparring
now.
If you look at strength and conditioning, you don't need to drive yourself into the
ground.
And I've done, when we did the three, four, three this year, I've just been doing Wolf
Brigade programming.
So it's not CrossFit style stuff anymore.
I haven't done that for at least a year, but it's a lot of Maces and kettlebells and there
is, you know, a Metcon element to it, but it's very strict strength movement.
And it's served me for about 50 years old, I'm still competing with the young lads and
we didn't obviously podium, but we ended up in the middle of the pack in the end.
And it's just kind of cool to see that.
Okay, well, you know, you don't have to murder yourself with Murph every day to still be
functional and pain free at 50 years old and still be able to do the job.
Yeah, like I said, there's a time and a place.
You just have to be intentional with what your training is and your goals.
And, you know, I'm big on like active recovery days now.
And so for that, I'll do either rucking or a walk or I'll get on my exercise bike and
just ride that.
And I've been doing a lot of zone two running too, because before I would just run all out.
And it's like, that's not always the best either.
You know, there's a lot of benefit in the zone two running and slowing down a little
bit, but you're still moving.
And then same thing now, you know, almost every shift I get in gear and do a gear workout.
And but yeah, just it's been a it's been a humbling experience.
And that was the other thing I tell people too, is like before I had my back injury,
I don't want to say I was taking training for granted, but it was starting to feel kind
of like a chore.
I was kind of getting a little burnt out with it.
And then when it got completely taken away, now my mindset is whenever I do a workout
or whenever it's like getting hard, it's I'm just grateful.
I'm just grateful that I'm able to, you know, sign up for a CrossFit competition and compete
and and not get hurt and be able to enjoy it and have fun.
Absolutely.
Well, I want to get to the the firemanship, but just before we do, you touched on again
about, you know, the guy, for example, doesn't seem to want to work out his piece of shit.
You know, that there is that element, especially when when you have owned your strength and
conditioning despite the environment that you're in.
So you have, you know, these deconditioned guys that sit in the lazy boy and say it's
always the fit guys to get hurt.
I mean, I've heard it my whole career.
But there's a there's obviously, you know, a two part element of this conversation, ownership
is part of it, but also the environment.
And I teach a free class in Iron Legion here.
And it's really hard to get people to come.
It's free for fire police, military corrections, dispatchers.
But up here, they're 56 hours a week, constant mandatory.
So the other side of it is that, well, if when they get to go home, they just want to,
you know, go home, be with their kids.
They don't want to be, you know, working out in a CrossFit gym.
So I think this is the other part of that 24 72 conversation is when you give them more
rest and recovery, then you can put that bar back.
So with that being said, you know, let's say, for example, your department shifts to that.
What are your thoughts on fitness standards in the fire service?
Because to me, I have special forces soldiers, I have ocean lifeguards.
I was a lifeguard myself for quite a while too.
If you don't hit that bar every year, you just you're not a lifeguard anymore.
It's just that simple.
But police and fire, you know, where lives are at stake.
Admin unions are so much resistance to a simple fitness standard and one that, you know, you
don't have to reinvent the wheel.
A CPAT, the fire sled version of it, something that's functional with tools that we have
to use is fair for men, women, you know, 1850, whatever it is.
So what is your kind of overall philosophy on a fitness standard in our profession?
Yeah, I think there should definitely be some sort of fitness, either agility test or assessment
every year that you have to complete.
So we just implemented one like a year or two ago in our department.
And like you would expect, we had a lot of pushback from, you know, the union and it
is what it is.
So I think there should be some sort of assessment.
And before that, I would have family members or friends who are not in the fire service,
they would ask me like, oh, you have to you have to be fit to do the job.
Like, don't you have to do an annual assessment every year?
And I'd say no, we currently at my department, you just have a pre hire physical agility
and that's it.
And that's the case in a lot of departments and the look of shock on their face.
So it just made me laugh.
And it was always frustrating to me.
But, you know, at the end of the day, and I tell the new guys this too, is you can only
control what you can control.
And the greatest way to create change or change the culture in your department is by doing
it yourself and then with your crew.
And eventually, you will change the department because what ends up happening is if you have
a crew culture where everybody knows on the crew that when you guys show up, you know,
you're going to eat together, you're going to do all the chores together, you're going
to hang around the kitchen table or on the front bumper.
And you know, you're going to work out or do some sort of training together that day.
Then whenever things happen, such as promotions, or, you know, shift changes, or maybe some
people leave and they have to go fill a spot somewhere else, whoever gets moved, they're
going to go to that new crew.
And then they're kind of like your ambassador.
And hopefully they continue doing what you guys were doing on this crew, they create
some buy in over there, and then they're able to change that crew.
And then over time, it's like a domino effect.
And I get that question all the time too, because people have asked me how have you
been able to do it.
And it's kind of simple, not easy.
You know, you just have to start with yourself.
And then when people see you doing stuff in the bay, be welcoming, say, hey, come join
me.
I just don't want to be alone.
Like, you know, I'm doing this workout.
One of my favorite workouts to get people involved is I'll set up an O course type workout.
You know, there'll be four or five different like skill stations, if that's what you want
to call it, or workout stations.
And I'll just put a clock on for a minute or two for each station.
And it'll be, you know, a 15 to 30 minute workout.
And that way, if you're doing tire hits, if somebody who's very fit wants to do a thousand
tire hits in that two minutes, it doesn't matter because there's only one person at
that station.
You don't have to worry about overlap.
Everybody's kind of focused on doing their own thing.
They're not watching what the other person's doing.
And it's to their fitness level.
You know, I tell people to like, you don't have to be in your gear.
How about you just put your air pack on, you know, and start there or just put your coat
on.
And, you know, it's kind of a I don't know where I heard this quote, but I've heard it
a lot of times and they say, you know, to have a high standard for yourself, but be
tolerant of others and then, you know, get them elevated to that standard.
So but going back to the original question on yearly, you know, physical assessments,
I mean, I'm sure, you know, my take on it, but it's not as easy as somebody wanting that.
There's a lot of implications.
You know, the union doesn't want people to lose their jobs.
Admin doesn't want people getting hurt.
And so there's a lot of red tape involved with that type of stuff.
It's interesting because I've seen the pushback on the shift change, you know, the shift schedule
change and it's the same with this.
If you take a step back and think that you're opposing the things that allow you to perform
as a firefighter and also contribute to you having a healthy retirement and you're opposing
that, it's such a backward way of thinking.
And this knee jerk about, oh, they're trying to take our jobs.
Of course, if when you finally get to implement an actual, you know, punitive fitness standard,
there needs to be an on ramp session of, you know, a year, two years, whatever it is to
allow these people that have been deconditioned to get back to where they need to be.
And like I said, coupled with a work week that encourages them to be fit and gives them
the energy stops destroying their hormones, you know, all these things.
But once you've got to that point, you know, you've got to understand that there is no
downside to a fitness standard, especially if it's a fair one.
Like I said, you use, you know, ladders and hoes and dummies and all the things that you
would have to do in an actual fire.
That is what makes it fair.
You don't have to do max jump test and deadlifts and things that, you know, don't really carry
over, you know.
So, but I think that's what's going to be nice to see hopefully go hand in hand with
this improved work week is putting the standard back up because when you're talking about
the recruitment side, young driven firefighter recruits want to go to somewhere that they're
held to a high standard, somewhere that's a challenge, you know, and if you're already
fit when you walk through the door as a young recruit and you then see, okay, every year
I'm going to be held to the standard, then 20 years later, 25 years later, hopefully
healthy, 55, you know, whatever your old firefighters are then going to have an amazing retirement
versus, oh, the fittest ever was, was in the academy, which is a really piss poor thing
to do to hear from someone who's been on 15, 20 years and now they're on statins and a
CPAP and all this thing because no one ever held them to a standard.
Yeah.
And like you said, you know, changing the work schedule.
I think that's the other thing is right now the biggest issue, at least in the, you know,
central Florida area is recruitment and, and, and retaining firefighters.
So if you go to a more desirable schedule, you're going to have a line of recruits lined
up at the door to get in.
And you know, like right now, a lot of departments are having issues just putting asses in the
seats.
So they definitely don't want to get rid of anybody because then it just exacerbates the
problem.
So changing the work schedule, you're going to have a higher quality candidate, more candidates
going to be wanting to work there, be held to a higher standard.
And then if the person who is on the department doesn't want to, you know, fix the issues
that they have, that's what fire prevention is for.
So like I said, it's such a deep rooted issue that has so many, you know, red tape government
type stuff that blocks it.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I really, I'm, I'm excited because once you've created an environment that allows
people to thrive, then you can start addressing these.
And like I said, to be fair, now these people are rested enough where they start feeling
better and start actually wanting to get back to where they were.
So I think it's a very positive, you know, potential movement there.
So let's talk about rogue firemanship then you've gone through this incredible journey.
And I'm so glad that we kind of traversed this smoke diver path that you took because
it kind of illustrates the, you know, the depth of your training and, you know, the
dos and the don'ts, all those kinds of things.
So what made you create your own company and let's talk about what you offer.
Yeah.
So it kind of just started because a couple of my buddies are like, you know, you're always
posting on your personal social media, you know, about stuff fire related.
They're like, you know, you should make a fire page.
And I've been kind of kicking the idea around for a few years, but just never really knew
what I wanted to do.
So then last December, I finally just pulled the trigger before my daughter was born.
I came up with the company and a broke rogue firemanship.
And the reason I chose rogue is because I feel like I've always been, I've kind of always
had a, like a rogue mentality.
I'm never always gone with or conform to like the norm or what, you know, the, the status
quo is that's never been enough for me.
Even growing up, you know, I skateboarded as a kid.
So kind of that type of, I don't want to say rebellious, but you know, like skateboarders,
DMXers, motocross guys, they're not, their, their way of thinking and what they stand
for is not quite normal to what, how normal society operates or normal like sports teams
operate.
And then, you know, wrestling, it's not a very, it wasn't very popular when I went through
school, you know, it was either football or baseball.
And then, you know, coming up through the fire service, I was going to conferences,
taking classes, going above the minimum standard.
And that was kind of always considered like rogue, right?
You're not doing what is normal, I guess, in your own four walls of the department.
And as far as firemanship, I just always loved how firefighting is, I think it should be
like a, it is an apprenticeship.
It's a craft and it's no different than if you want to be a journeyman, you know, plumber
or electrician or journeyman iron worker, right?
There's levels to it and it's a craft.
You know, if you don't know the basic fundamentals, it's going to make it very hard for you to
rise up to the ranks and be a effective leader because you can, sadly, in the fire service,
not necessarily be a great fireman.
And you can end up in a company officer role just because you happen to test well that
day.
And you just, you know, learn how to do, say, some checkbox tactics on a piece of paper
and you know, you get the job and now you have a pro be under you that you have to now
teach to be a good fireman, which you never took the time to do that.
And it's a problem I've seen in every department, you know, not necessarily just mine.
So I created the page and just kind of as an outlet for me to, you know, express my
experiences and my opinions on things in the fire service and things I've encountered.
And I also wanted to do like fitness programming for firefighters because I noticed even when
I was coming up, not a lot of firefighter fitness programs, I say that like in quotations
actually had anything in gear.
It was a lot of like CrossFit style workouts, lifting, sled pushes and slide drags, which
like I said before, those are all great and will help get you prepared for the job and
not quite like working out in gear.
And before that, I was always on my personal page was always posting whatever workouts
I was doing just to share with people and I was always getting people you know, that
would mess with me like say, Hey, I just did that workout.
Thank you for sharing that.
And you know, they would say them and their crew got it done, which was always so rewarding
to me.
So I just created the page to just kind of separate my personal social media from that.
And it's really taken off.
I've had a lot of help.
John Sparrow from Fit to Fight Fire and Marcos Orozco from Hard Knock Sunday.
They have been with me since its inception and really helped me, you know, get it off
the ground.
We pretty much text every week and kind of share ideas.
And my favorite thing about that is we're all I guess you could say like in the firefighter
fitness space, but it's not really a competition.
Like we just care about people getting more fit.
Like I have a couple buddies down in the southwest Florida area, the Naples area, Mason and
Remy they're both Florida smoke divers.
They created a page called firefighter endurance and same thing.
They post firefighter workouts every single day.
And I've tried to I've helped them.
I share their stuff every day and they've asked me stuff and I just gave them my opinion.
And it's not it's not a competition to me.
I just want the fire service as a whole to get more fit and whether they like John Sparrow
style Marcos style, the firefighter endurance style or my style.
I don't care.
I just, you know, I'm making a little bit of money, but it's not about the money.
It's not about the money.
It's just, you know, I'm just, you know, I'm just, you know, I'm just, you know, I'm just
trying to get people to get better.
And like I said, it's been very rewarding.
I started it last December and the page has really taken off and I get messages all the
time of guys, you know, they'll take a picture with their crew and they did one of the workouts
and they're like, yeah, before the crew never wanted to work out and now they're working
out with me and kind of going through the same things I had gone through.
And it's just rewarding to see that they're also having an impact on their crews through
the page.
Beautiful.
And you're offering an actual workout program too.
Yeah.
So I offer three different ones.
I have a 12 week program that is, uh, it's called the rogue operator and it's very similar
to how I train.
It was just kind of my style of training that I put together on a 12 week program that somebody
can follow from start to finish.
And I also offer a monthly training program that is, um, kind of the same style as the
rogue operator, but it just continues on, on a subscription subscription basis.
It's four to five workouts a week mixed in strength, strength and conditioning and, uh,
gear workouts.
That's 20 bucks a month.
And then, uh, for people who are wanting more than just like the preset workouts, uh, I
do one-on-one coaching as well.
So I have a couple of guys that they're going through some of our programs, uh, in different
states as well as Florida.
So I'm writing workouts for them.
And I've even had some people that they just wanted to pass their firefighter, uh, new
hire physical or a CPAT and I've helped some people do that as well.
So it's kind of crazy.
I was looking at the analytics the other day and between all the, between those three programs,
I've helped so far over 200 firefighters and it's been over only coming up on 10 months
now.
So that's been super rewarding and awesome.
And it's crazy.
You know, people are talking to me and stuff that they're doing or, you know, they'll buy
a hat or a shirt.
And it was funny, I was packaging some stuff to send and my wife was looking at the labels
and she's like, you're sending this to Canada.
And like I said, dude, I'm nobody from nowhere, man.
It's just humbling that somebody all the way from Canada, I saw the page and wanted to
buy a shirt or a hat or, you know, it's some people, you know, they give social media a
bad name, but I think it can be used for a lot of good as well.
A hundred percent.
Couldn't agree more.
So for people listening, where can they find the site and the page?
So the Instagram page is a rogue firemanship training.
And then it's also a Facebook page is rogue firemanship.
And then I have a website as well, rogue firemanship.com.
One more question before we close out.
When will your next attempt at the Florida smoke diver be?
So I'm actually going in February of 25.
I just did the tryout in September and I got in, I competed with over a hundred candidates
and was lucky enough to get in.
So feeling good.
Feel stoked to give it one more, one more shot and I'll be back in February.
Amazing.
Well, I want to thank you so much, firstly, from driving all the way up to Ocala, but
secondly for sharing your story.
Obviously we focus a little bit more on the fitness stuff today, but I think it's, it's
really important that we kind of put that front and center because this goes hand in
hand with the cancer, the mental health, all the other things, you know, we know that exercise
is not only important for our performance, but our longevity as well.
And this unique path you've been on, you know, and the humility to talk about, you know,
the failures and I don't perceive them as failures.
The journey you've been on is really the success, but you know, this dogmatic chasing of the
Florida smoke divers is a, is a powerful part too.
So I want to thank you so much for being so generous with your time and coming on behind
the shield podcast today.
The problem, thanks for having me.
It's been an honor.