The Girl Can't Help It (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine April 2003

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The Girl Can't Help It (Cont.)


	With Team Firejock members Stacy Billapando and R.C. Smith (Mary Ellen Mark)

KEEP AN EYE OUT for Juliet Draper. Though her fame currently resounds only in the smallish world of fitness-obsessed firefighters, she has much bigger plans. Her current mantra is "I aspire to be the international voice of firefighter fitness." Ask her to expand on that and she says, "There isn't one, so it might as well be me."

"All I want to do is finish," says The Fat of his race in the Combat Challenge. "I don't want people saying, remember when the chief got tangled in a hose? Remember when the chief puked?

If this happens, a lot of the credit will go to Juliet's live-in girlfriend, Pamela Jones, 49, a motherly schmoozer who, back in the eighties, promoted the meteoric career of her sister, new-wave diva Grace Jones. Pamela favors the all-encompassing approach to marketing the Juliet brand. In the past few years, she's cooked up everything from a firefighter-fitness Web site (www.firejock.com) to a disco CD to promotional photographs of Juliet—naked except for a large African mask.

Will any of this turn Juliet into the next Tony Little? Does it matter? Whether she goes global or not, her message is worth hearing, and she'll gladly shout it in your ear. It's partly about her crusade to improve the fitness level of American firefighters, a group of people who—their deservedly heroic image notwithstanding—could use some help shaping up. But it's also about Juliet's quasi-religious conviction that fitness is good for the soul. Her own obsession with exercise, she says, saved her life. She coaches Billapando, Peffer, and Smith not just to prove the effectiveness of her training style but to inspire other firefighters to get up and move.

"I consider fitness to be part of our sacred oath," Juliet says solemnly, "and not all firefighters are as buff as they look. We're talking about guys who had it when they came on the job 20 years ago, but haven't kept up. A great athlete at 25 needs to be great at 45, or what good does it do him when Grandma falls out of bed and she weighs 400 pounds and you have to put her back in?"

The firefighting lifestyle, Juliet points out, involves waiting for calls, which involves eating too much firehouse cuisine. (One classic dish, a concoction of ground beef topped with Tater Tots, is universally known as "grease pie.") And even healthy brown-baggers like Juliet are not immune to the job's crippling stress.

Studies bear this out: Firefighters are far more likely to die from a heart attack than a fire, and they exhibit greater indicators of heart disease than the general public. Wade Womack, an applied-exercise scientist at Texas A&M, conducted a six-year study of 74 working firefighters and found that "their aerobic capacity was lower than age-predicted norms, and their body fat higher. It has to do with a lot of downtime, with being sedentary. Once you've passed that fitness test to get on the job, it's not necessarily done again."

"When firefighters are first hired, they're healthier than the general population, but they tend to retire less healthy than their peers," says George Burke, president of the Washington, D.C.-based International Association of Fire Fighters, which has developed a voluntary firefighter-wellness program in recent years. "The leading cause of death in firefighters is heart attacks, not because these are big, fat, sloppy guys, but because they carry 75 pounds of protective gear and they do stressful physical work. They go from sleep to adrenaline in minutes."

If someone gave Juliet a big whistle, she would attack these problems with megadoses of exercise and intense motivation. "It ain't got to be Mount Everest every week!" she exhorts. "Just show up! What's your favorite sport on TV? How 'bout you play football or baseball—or we can work on your golf swing. Why not? We'll get a book! We'll learn this together! Pick a sport!"

On a more basic level, she would institute regular, rigorous workouts, heated competitions—all departments duking it out against one another in the Challenge!—and mandatory yearly fitness testing, with results that could determine whether or not a firefighter stays on the force.

"Not a popular idea," Juliet admits. "And I would not punish the guys who have been around and should be grandfathered in. But I would require new recruits to stay fit, and I'd test them." Without testing, she says, "most of us in firefighting end up acting like regular folks, and time goes by and we begin to lose it."

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