The CPAT:
One Woman's Experience

There are two sayings appropriate to the goal I was attempting in June of 2001. One is, be careful what you wish for because you just might get it. The other is, never say "never." These useful words were running through my mind almost nonstop as I waited in line outside the Montana State University Ballroom in Bozeman for the civil service portion of what would be the first Candidate Physical Ability Test (CPAT) held in Montana. The International Association of Fire Chiefs and International Association of Fire Fighters had spent two years designing this new physical abilities fire test, and the Montana Fire Consortium had adopted it as their new standard.

Two years earlier, I had taken the old firefighter exam, and along with all the other women who'd taken it in the state, I failed to complete it in the time allowed. The old test consisted of nine physical stations with a six-minute time limit. It was pretty brutal. My time ran out as I stepped (staggered, actually) out of the eighth station.

Overall, the experience had been very positive, but I had never planned on repeating it. Your body can only do what it can do, and mine at the age of 37 wasn't going to get me across that line in six minutes. Being a 5'5" woman also didn't help, since it seemed the ideal body type for that test was something more like a 5'10" - 6'4" male. Since fire tests are supposed to be as unbiased as possible, I had wished the Consortium would consider changing their test or adopting a new one.

When I took the test two years ago, I was very impressed with the firefighters administering it. They had been very professional: courteous, helpful, and kind. I kept reminding myself of that now as I stood in line listening to a couple of the younger candidates behind me trying to impress each other with all the fire tests they'd taken. I mentally rolled my eyes. Of about 300 candidates there, only 20 of us were women. Two were my friends and part-time training partners, and I was longing for the sight of them as I stood there quietly.

I make my living as a pediatric dental assistant. Working with small tools in little mouths is a far cry from fighting structure fires. But I had other skills, such as experience in search and rescue, medical training, and wildland firefighting, that didn't make it completely out of the question. Having been through this once already, I thought I'd never be that nervous again. I was wrong.

I was distinctly on the outside looking in. I'm a social person, and I felt like I was starving. I listened to men around me introduce themselves and visit with the other men they happened to be standing next to in line. The word "invisible" came to mind. It was a little depressing that none of these potential brave heroes all around me was brave enough to pass the time of day with me. "Well what did you expect, the Welcome Wagon?" I asked myself as I shrugged it off. Nobody was being mean; they were just overly cautious.

It's been more than 25 years since the first women started working as firefighters in other parts of the country. All the ground that has been gained in other places, however, has hardly even begun to be covered in Montana. While women have served on major departments from California to New York, Montana at this time had the dubious distinction of having only five women firefighters on its urban fire departments.

Before the advent of the Consortium in 1997, every Montana fire department had its own physical abilities test, some more unfortunately designed than others. It seems everyone agrees the job of firefighter is extremely physically demanding. But the art and science of measuring the exact amount of physical ability needed to do the job has long been debated.

After I decided to take the old test, I became fascinated with the process itself, and curious about the statistics. I thought it would be very helpful to study average candidate times for each station, or differences between male and female performance, among other things. I knew this would give me a better idea how to target my own training. It turned out, however, they didn't keep many statistics beyond pass/fail numbers.

In addition, there were no training programs available for the test. No women had ever managed to pass the test, and some people were beginning to wonder whether it had been specifically designed to keep women out. Nine stations to be completed in six minutes seemed pretty specific, but with no explanation of how they had chosen the stations or set the time limit, I wondered how scientifically and legally reliable those decisions were.

The IAFF and IAFC saw the need to attempt to address the entry-level testing issue, and they came up with the CPAT. The test is designed to measure a candidate's fitness as well as muscular strength, using tasks that would conceivably be performed as a working firefighter. Its eight stations must be completed in 10 minutes and 20 seconds, and various rules cover how a candidate performs each station. CPAT works candidates very hard, but has small windows of recovery built in. The stations are separated by an 85-foot distance candidates are required to walk, not run. The walk doesn't last long enough for your heart to come down out of anaerobic level; it's just enough to maintain the current level instead of constantly elevating it.

It was a big surprise to me to receive a call from Helena's Fire Chief Steve Larsen in the fall of 2000. He was getting in touch with women who had taken the old test and might be interested in giving the CPAT a try. I reminded him I would be 39 when this test was held. He suggested that if I managed to pass the CPAT -- and many women in other states had passed it -- I could challenge the Montana law that prohibited hiring firefighters over the age of 34. Talk about long shots! I thought this was putting the cart so far in front of the horse that I could look back and never even see his nose. But it was intriguing, so I came over to the fire station and watched the film about the CPAT anyway.

I figured the chief must have been hurting for female candidates who wanted to try this test. Having taken the old one, I had no problem understanding why: I knew what a huge investment of time this effort would take. I really didn't have any illusions about it being a great opportunity to change careers. Even if I managed to pass the test, I would be a good ten to fifteen years older than the other candidates. The odds of my ending up with a job out of it all were not good. But when I talked it over with my husband, he said exactly what had been going through my mind: "You know if you don't try this, you'll wonder for the rest of your life." So I called the fire chief back and told him," I'm in."

I'm glad the Montana Consortium adopted the CPAT as its new physical test. But for whatever reason, probably money, they still didn't make a training program available. So I was on my own again. As I began my workouts, I also started doing research. I tried to find training programs specifically designed for women, but I found none. I tried to get in touch by e-mail with women who had taken the CPAT, with limited success. A woman from New York told me the best training for CPAT was to perform the test itself over and over and over. This wasn't much help, since I had learned that none of the stations or equipment would be available for practice.

All right, I thought: improvise. I got in contact with a woman in Frenchtown named
Charlene. She worked for the Frenchtown fire district and had taken the same test I had two years before. She had also taken the CPAT twice in other states. Charlene had set up a mock course that she and a friend ran through once a week, and she generously offered to let me run through it with her as many times as I could manage to get down there. By this point, it was winter, and I couldn't see driving to Frenchtown until spring. In the meantime, I still had a lot of training to do.

The Consortium's training guide was interesting, but not as helpful as it could have been. While it was quite detailed, including a twelve-week program that looked really good, you needed a facility to hold it in. It specified 90-minute workouts using circuit training and a progression of running miles. But unless you could talk a health club into setting up the whole circuit just for you, I didn't see how it could realistically be duplicated. And even assuming they would set it up, and also assuming I could afford what they would charge me for it, I didn't want to live at the health club. Nor did running five days a week in the middle of winter in Montana didn't appeal to me. I know people do it, but I wasn't eager to be one of them.

I had to deal in reality. The reality was, I was not a single man in my twenties. I was a married woman pushing 40, with two small children and a full-time job. I could see no way to follow the Consortium's training schedule and still manage to spend much time with my family, let alone function well at my job. Taking the training in a facility as a specific course, with a specific time frame, would have been a whole different proposition. Hardly any of the other candidates I talked to had followed the training guide's recommendations, for much the same reasons. Still, the instructions in the back about target training for the different stations were helpful, and I made use of them.

Having babies had been a real eye-opener for me. It taught me that sleep is essential to life, and planning 48 hours of activity for every 24 just doesn't work. I knew I either had to design a training program of my own or chuck the whole idea. I chose the former. My goals were: to use training time as efficiently as possible, to change my body composition from a little less fat to a little more muscle, to significantly improve my aerobic and anaerobic capacity, and to still have a life.

What I came up with after a lot of research, including advice from my doctor and a physical therapist, was a mish-mash that really worked. For aerobic and anaerobic conditioning, I used Lance Armstrong's target heart rate training program. I learned what you do for aerobic conditioning really isn't as important as what level you do it at. Armstrong's training program tailors your workouts to different heart rate levels. You calculate your maximum heart rate (by subtracting your age from 220), and work out at 65-75% of that, three or four times a week.

Then you add one or two power interval workouts a week. These are done at 75-80% of maximum, with rest intervals in between. For example, after warming up for 5 to 10 minutes, you might take the rest of the workout time going 3 minutes up, 6 minutes down (your down time is always twice the amount of your up time), and then repeating it. According to Armstrong and his coach, it is very important to keep your heart rate within 2 to 3 beats of the target range. This ensures the greatest benefit in the shortest time.

I bought a heart monitor and kept a log of my workouts. Although getting there isn't very comfortable, once you're in anaerobic level you're not even really breathing that hard. The body switches over to different systems to handle the huge increase in demand for oxygen, like a truck switching gears to climb a hill.

The workout done the day after an interval workout must be at the bottom of your aerobic scale. This is called "active resting." It keeps your muscles limber and flushes out all the lactic acid built up without overtraining. If you don't do it, you feel pretty much like you've been run over by a car all the time. Beating yourself up and stressing your heart instead of training it to be a more efficient machine is not what you're aiming for.

All of the literature I've read has indicated that women don't gain a lot of muscle using a circuit program like the Consortium's. It makes sense that smaller-framed human beings (i.e., most women) might need to add to their upper-body muscle mass in order to attempt a firefighter test. I used Joyce Vedral's isolation weight training for women. I found as my training progressed that with all the leg conditioning I was doing in my aerobic workouts, I didn't need to do any squats or lunges, which can be hard on the joints. I was also having a major problem with keeping my hamstrings and quads stretched out sufficiently. So I eventually changed to a shortened upper-body workout to maintain what I had gained in muscle already.

These things were fine in themselves, but my flexibility was not good. Yoga turned out to be the key that brought it all together. It reminded me of football players taking ballet. Yoga is very deceptive, because it uses slow movements and poses to train the body. It has elements of weight lifting, because you're moving and balancing your own body weight, and also wonderful and very effective stretching that helps you relax. In addition, yoga specifically trains you to learn to control your breathing under stress, so you get the most out of each breath. These are talents any athlete or firefighter would find very useful! For me, it brought all the other training methods together by adding strength, flexibility, breathing, balance and relaxation.

Most of my yoga comes from Ashtanga discipline, which is at the more athletic end of the scale. It took me just about 30 minutes in the mornings, and I tried to do it every day. I found that after I had been doing it for a few weeks, my muscle and joint pain virtually disappeared. I also made great strides in slowing my heart rate down more quickly after interval training. As a side benefit, I was also able to impress my sons with my newfound ability to stand in pretzel poses one-legged for long periods of time.

So, my goal of a highly efficient training system designed for a woman ended up as:

It was probably inevitable that I got sick. I got the flu at the end of November, and
spent most of December and January crawling out of it. I had to stop my training because I found it hard to breathe while coughing uncontrollably. As soon as I did manage a respectable training period, I'd relapse into another sinus infection or bronchitis. With the test set for early June, I thought I might have to give up taking it at all.

Finally, in May, I got back in touch with Charlene, and went to Frenchtown to run the mock CPAT course with her and her friend, Jenny. I'd just finished my last course of antibiotics a week before and still wasn't breathing right. Truly, I was just looking for an excuse to quit. Standing beside Charlene at 5'11", and Jenny at 5'9", I felt like a Shetland pony that had somehow wandered into the thoroughbred barn -- and not just any pony, but one that hauled carts out of the coal mines and was working on a case of black lung.

Charlene and Jenny had been doing the mock test all winter. They told me about high- stepping through the snow and having it take 18 minutes just to slog through the course. All CPAT candidates wear a 50-pound weighted vest during the test. Charlene and Jenny had been using an old air tank filled with rocks. Then the fire chief in Frenchtown got one of the actual vests used in the test, and also got the two 12-pound strips used on the shoulders for the first station, the stair machine. I showed up at the right time because he was allowing them to practice with these items.

I don't know many people who look forward to climbing stairs with 74 pounds on their back. It takes a determined mental attitude that I was sadly lacking at that point. Mental attitude is crucial when training for a test like this, but after being sick for most of the winter, I found mine was at rock bottom. Somehow, though, just being with women who were going through the same things I was, trying to reach the same goal, completely recharged me. I knew if I got sick again before June I was done, but otherwise, I wouldn't quit.

The first time I ran the mock course, I did it in 11 minutes, 8 seconds. This wasn't bad, considering I hadn't been able to get out of bed the week before. I felt like a walking wreck. I still couldn't breathe right, and my attitude was rotten! I remember being on my knees, jerking the fire hose to me, wasting a lot of good potential forward energy in a mental tantrum. "THIS.....DOESN"T.....FEEL.....GOOD!!!!!

Charlene had doubled up the fire hose we were pulling, so when we took the real CPAT, the hose station would feel easy. Like me, she well remembered the 3" hose used on the old test. While the hose station on the CPAT uses 1 3/4" hose, we weren't taking any chances.

I didn't have any problem pulling the rescue dummy which at 175 pounds was the heaviest one available. I had a harder time with the sledge hammer station, a junk car that we beat on with a 10-pound sledge hammer. Swinging the sledge from the side to hit a chest-high target was difficult. The hammer wasn't too heavy, but I just couldn't seem to stop treating it like an axe, moving my hand too far up and down the handle. I needed to find a shorter, more compact swing. I knew I needed a lot of practice with this station, but couldn't figure out how to get it. I could just imagine going back to Helena and approaching some junk yard owners. "Excuse me, would you mind if I just beat on a few of your cars for a while?"

I had each of us wear my heart monitor when we ran through the course. Interestingly we were all working close to the same level, with heart rates in the 170's. My maximum heart rate (MHR) at my age is 179. Jenny and Charlene, being in their early twenties have a much higher MHR, somewhere around 195-197. So while I was working close to my MHR, they had a little more in reserve.

While working in short intervals to reach and maintain levels close to MHR provides good training, continuously working at MHR is not a good idea. As every firefighter knows, working a pump beyond capacity for a long period is a bad plan. This is why if an individual never trains at anaerobic levels, taking a fire test can be a horrendous shock to the body. This applies to active firefighters as well as to people training for a specific event such as CPAT.

The second time I went through the course I cut off 16 seconds. When I went back another time I took off 8 more. Good, but not good enough. Anyone who has competed in timed events knows even a few seconds covers a whole lot of ground.

Continue to Part 2