Fueling The Fire: Nutrition And Policy Changes For Wildland Firefighters With James Shelley

Nutrition plays a vital role in the well-being and performance of wildland firefighters, shaping their physical and mental resilience in the face of demanding and dangerous conditions. In this episode, we continue the previous discussions around human performance and nutrition. This time, we look into the policy changes for how our wildland firefighters are fed during fire assignments. Joining us is the perfect guest for this conversation. James Shelley is not only well-versed in the world of wildland firefighting, being a wildland firefighter himself; he is also versed in nutrition since he is currently a dietetics student at the University of Alaska. Just this year, he became the owner of Frontier Performance Nutrition, where the goal is to change the game for those living high-performance, time-demanding lifestyles.

James shares his journey from U.S. Marine Vet to firefighting to studying dietetics, discovering his passion for nutrition while working as a dog musher in Alaska. He soon found similarities between sled dogs and wildland firefighters, especially when it comes to nutrition. James highlights the need for individualized nutrition, improved meal quality, and increased communication among firefighters. He dives deep into hydration, electrolyte sources, and the challenges of implementing nutrition initiatives. Addressing the party culture and alcohol consumption among firefighters, James emphasizes personal accountability and the importance of reliable research. Join us as we explore the path to better nutrition and policy changes for wildland firefighters, striving for a healthier and safer future.

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Fueling The Fire: Nutrition And Policy Changes For Wildland Firefighters With James Shelley

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Ladies and gentlemen welcome back to another episode of Anchor Point. This is going to be a follow-up episode to the previous one with Paul Tijerina and his nutrition episode. This is all going to be about policy. What I mean by policy is if you don't like the fire lunches, because we all know they suck, this is how you're going to voice your concerns and help drive and implement change. It's a perfect episode for Paul's nutrition episode. It's more power for you to change the situation for yourself on the ground, but you got to do it the right way.

Gentlemen, out of the Tonto National Forest, he is all about changing the game here when it comes to nutrition, especially what we serve on the fire line, in fire camps, and in our damn fire lunches. He is a dietetics student at the University of Alaska. He's also a dog musher. He pieced together his idea of nutrition and optimization based on his racing dogs. It’s a weird connection but if it works, it works. He got into the fire in 2019 after leaving the Marines. He spent four years as an Infantryman. He's got a huge passion for all your tactical athletes, military, firefighters, climbers, hunters, and people that have wild irregular lifestyles. Without further ado, I would like to introduce my good friend, James Shelley. Welcome to the Anchor Point. What's going on? How are you doing?

I’m good. How have you been?                                                                                                   

Not too bad. Real busy.

Same here. Just started the season, so getting rolling down here.

This is recorded probably in advance of the recent incident that happened around the Coronado. Did they ever catch that guy?

The Molino 2 there?

Yeah.

I haven't heard anything as far as them actually catching anybody, but I'm up on the Tonto. I've not heard any updates on it yet.

They play dumb games to win stupid prizes. I hope they catch that guy.

It's nothing new. I'm in the Mesa Ranger District. Especially this time of year before the forest goes into restrictions, most of our fires come from the shooting pits. At the end of the day when they're about to leave, they fill in the fridges with Tannerite and shoot it, blow it up, and then take off. People play dumb games.

I don't know if anybody has seen the horror stories of Tannerite, but it is an explosive. If you know what you're doing, go try it out. Just don't overdo it because I've seen people blow up refrigerators and get smacked by the door or blow up a lawnmower. There's a famous video out there on YouTube where this dude literally takes some shrapnel and it cuts his leg clean off from blowing up a lawnmower. Don't do dumb shit.

It's nasty. The fire is the least of the concern.

Common sense dictates you're not going to shoot dragon's breath rounds into dry grass.

That’s common sense, but not so common. That's definitely the bulk of our fires. Things are starting to move here and starting to dry out more. It's been colder than it has been in the past, but things are starting to move around a little bit. We had a little 10-acre one that the grass has definitely taken. I think the brush will be available here soon. It's looking like it's going to be pretty busy.

Hopefully, it's not hyper-destructive. I was down in your neck of the woods. I was on the Apache-Sitgreaves in 2011 during the Wallow Fire. That was some gnarly shit. Hopefully, it doesn't have another repeat of that year.

Beyond the district, we had a bushfire in 2020, which is about 200,000 acres. That the whole scar from that is filled in with pretty tall grass. We're looking at a lot of grass fires in that area this year. Obviously, the heavies aren't grown back or anything. It shouldn't be too crazy but we will see.

All the native heavies have gotten taken out by that previous historical fire. It still hasn't come back. When was that?

That was in 2020. That was started by a vehicle that parked in the brush after overheating.

Don't do dumb stuff. A lot of people probably don't consciously think about the regen on their diesel.

The most common stuff is shooting pits because we got a lot of shooting pits in the district, and then people dragging chains by the highway. We have a busy highway that goes through the middle running up to Payson. Folks are coming down. After trying to cool off for the weekend, they're coming back down. They’re going up on Fridays and coming down on Sundays. They drag chains on the way up and down.

Is that the Salt River?

There's the Salt that runs in our district and the Verde that runs on Cave Creek. The 87 Highway is the one that cuts up our district. It cuts right up right at the middle and heads up north toward Payson.

I’m not too familiar with too much of Region 3. I've only been there a handful of times, but not enough to know the roadways or anything like that.

It’s light and flashy. That's what it is here.

It's fun.

Fun and fast.

I'm a Region 4 guy, that's where my heart lies. Everything up here rips and quits in three days, and then it's off to the next one. You get a good lightning bus and you're getting your ass kicked for quite a few days and it's fun. It's cool too, especially from the air if you're on a helicopter module.

I'm on some engine. I did a few seasons in 2019 and 2020, then took that gap to go up to Alaska for a couple of years, and then came back down. I’m working on an engine right now. It's fun. You get night fires all the time too and things are busy. Down here in our district, our season goes from about right now until one monsoon, which could be late July or early August. We get a peppering of dry lightning, and then once the rains come, it's pretty much over for us.

It's off to the races in other regions.

We get ordered up to California or Montana and stuff like that.

That doesn't sound like a bad gig at all.

I enjoy it. It's addicting.

It's like that gentleman high that you constantly keep chasing. I think that's what keeps people coming back. It’s not for the damn pay. I can tell you that.

It's definitely not the pay.

We’re paid in sunsets. There we go. Tell us a little bit about yourself. What's your story? What's your background? You've gone to the University of Alaska to become a dietitian. You got that as well and you’re also a nutrition coach. Dive into it. Tell us about you.

I'm still pretty young. I just turned 26 and I graduated high school in 2015. Ten days after that, I enlisted in the Marine Corps as an Infantryman. I always had that desire to be underpaid and have a job that puts me all over the place doing weird things. I left for bootcamp ten days after graduating. I was in the infantry. I did a couple of deployments and loved it. It's similar to crew life where you walk constantly all day long for weeks on end. You come back for a couple of days, party up, and then head back out to the field where you get paid to shoot stuff and blow stuff up, travel the world with your friends, and do cool things.

That's pretty much what I spent doing for four years. I was in for four years from 2015 to 2019. The last two years, I essentially spent as a logistics chief. In the infantry, we don't have people that do all that stuff for us. We got to do it. We have logistics and stuff in the battalion, but when it comes to the company of 120 guys, we don't have individual logistics folks or cooks to do that stuff for us. We have people like me. That was my collateral duty for last year. I did all my infantry stuff, but I also was this logistics chief in charge of getting all the food, water, and transportation set up between different countries and getting all the gear from country to country, and all this other stuff.

A lot of moving parts and a lot of cool networking experiences. I spent the last two years of my contract doing that. Toward the end of it, I knew I was going to get out. I knew I didn't want to be a Marine forever. I was trying to figure out what to do. I remembered back. My aunt and uncle owned homes and properties. In 2013, that whole thing happened, and that was when I became familiar with who wildland firefighters were. At the time, I was already geared toward being a Marine, so that was already my path.

When I was getting to the end of my contract, I remembered that experience of coming back into town and seeing everything that had happened and just like that, how much work I saw that was put into it on the wildland firefighter side, that's when I became familiar with it. I was like, “Why don't I give that a shot?” I reached out to some folks here in Region 3. I think I went on the Forest Service website, and I started emailing people. I was emailing a bunch of guys and stuff like that, “I'm getting out of the Marine Corps soon. Do you guys have any spots open? What do I get to do to get a job with you?” I'm from Gilbert, Arizona and I wanted to stay somewhere close by because I hadn't been around for a few years.

One of the sups who does hire rookies sent my info to an engine in Mesa, and they picked me up on type six down here. I got picked up down here. I got out on April 26th, 2019, which is a Friday. I started here on the 29th, the following Monday. I took a weekend off, and then I started down here with the season. It was the best transition ever from being out of the military to jumping straight into something that’s like, “This is cool.” I have a sense of purpose and it's the same thing. I walk around with a pack and a bladder bag, and I put the fire out. It's similar. I walk around all day, sweat a lot, and don't get paid very much, but it's enjoyable. I came down here in 2019 to that type six and loved it. I loved the season.

I came back in 2020, did that season, and then decided I wanted to be an astronaut. There's a long story behind that. I was drunk around a campfire. We were talking about space and I was like, "That would be cool to go." I decided that I wanted to do that. I left everything and left the fire. I went back to school and moved to Alaska where I started Geological Engineering. Working my way through, I actually ended up in Dietetics. I was like looking back on my career as a Marine and a firefighter, realizing that I had never cared about what I ate. I saw how important it was and how much of an impact it had. The random thing I was doing is I'm a dog musher in Alaska, so I race dogs. I have a friend who was working on their nutrition too.

On the dogs, like the mushing dog’s nutrition?

Yeah. It is funny. There's a tie between sled dogs and wildland firefighters. I ended up finding it recently. My buddy had 130 dogs in his kennel at the time. They have a lot of dogs, and they were doing this research on giving dogs blueberries and what the antioxidants do when they're exposed to PM2.5, so wildfire smoke. They found the exercise in blueberries essentially helped with their reducing oxidative stress and whatnot from the smoke. There was a connection there. I had reached out to somebody. I didn't know this at the time, but she works in Missoula for NTDP with the Forest Service. Her name is Dr. Carla Cox.

There's actually a tie between sled dogs and wildland firefighters.

I had reached out to her about sled dogs and we were talking about it because she's a dietitian. We were bouncing stuff back and forth. I was trying to work with sled dogs and mushers at the time. Fast forward, I decided to leave Alaska and moved back to Arizona to work with firefighters and nutrition in the past years. I'm going through the Forest Service publications. In 2006, she and a guy named Dr. Brian Sharkey published the Wildland Firefighter Nutrition Guide essentially on the Forest Service website. This lady I was talking to about sled dogs ended up being also big in Wildland Firefighter Nutrition.

Set the standards, so to speak, as far as what is expected to be served to wildland firefighters.

It was good information too, as far as the numbers go. Firefighters should be getting anywhere from 1.2 to 1.8 grams per kilogram of protein, and they should be getting 4,900 to 7,000 calories a day, depending on activity levels, body weight, age, height, and whatnot. The information was good. It was just older. It was the only thing I could find at the time on the Forest Service website. It was cool to see that connection come back and fall into place as I came back down here for this.

Connecting sled dogs to wildland firefighters and the PM2.5s. That's the most harmful particulate matter that is cancerous or hard to get rid of. Can you explain the PM2.5s?

From what I understand about PM2.5, it is the baseline for wildland fire smoke that we're exposed to. When people say wildfire smoke, that's what they're referring to. You can find the publication on the Forest Service website that talks about the different chemicals that are in it. Among other things, there are 73 different chemicals that are toxic to the human body in PM2.5.

In one of those, acetone is in it too. There are all these harmful chemicals in it. It's not just this pleasant little campfire that people are breathing in. As an agency, that's not my area of expertise, but we've come to understand that breathing smoke is bad at least for cancer. We've done a lot in the past few years to recognize firefighter wellness. Nutrition is a part of that holistic bundle of things that we're trying to approach.

Another thing too is it's that presumptive illnesses as well like smoke inhalation and certain types of cancers. Just recently, a guy passed across legislation's hands and put it into law, which is pretty damn cool because that has never happened before. The IAFF has always had this presumptive illness stuff going in, and we never did as far as wildland firefighters. It’s a huge step in the right direction. Bringing it back to the point, PM2.5 is more like a catch-all term.

That's not my area of expertise. That's my buddy up there, Jake Wico, and his thesis on the effects on sled dogs and everything. Even that stuff wasn't specific to wildland firefighters. The individuals conducting the research, there were some folks involved that were relating it to structure guys. They were relating it to individuals that they didn't think applied to them because firefighters wear masks. Obviously, we don't, but the impression was that we did.

The research wasn't geared toward firefighters, it was solely geared toward dogs that are exposed to it in Alaska because they were racing them, and they wanted to see the damage that was done in the off-season. The summer is the off-season for racing dogs, so they wanted to see the damage that was being done if they were breathing in smoke pretty consistently.

Seems like a good analog there essentially. They're athlete dogs, but we use animal substitutes or I guess things that are analogous to the human body. Pigs are a big one and sometimes mice.

The way pigs bleed is pretty similar like pig trauma is pretty similar to humans.

Those things like that though, but we've been using animal analogs forever. Just because it's a dog and it's out of the ordinary, that doesn’t mean that data is any less valid. It's more information from those folks.

It brings up cool questions too. It’s sparked my interest as well. They are incredible athletes. I think the highest VO2 max is essentially the volume of oxygen that we get with every breath. Sled dogs are sprint dogs that I run. The higher classes with the most number of dogs run from anywhere from 14 to 22 dogs at once. The big race that we have the first 2 days is 20 miles, and the last day is 27. Their VO2 max, the highest ever record for the human was a Norwegian cross-country skier, Björn Dæhlie, 96 was the number. The dog’s average is anywhere from 240 to 300.

They're three times more athletic than the most athletic human being ever existed. We use VO2 max as a measure of athleticism. Mine run an average of about 2 minutes and 55 seconds per mile, and they're running. The winners of these races will run 20 miles in right about an hour, maybe a little less than an hour.

They're pulling a human in the sled.

They are relatively nicely groomed trails for sprinters because the races aren't so long, and they want to see how fast they can go. They can run faster if they're not pulling a sled. They're pulling a sled and running 20 miles an hour. They're pretty impressive creatures.

It’s hauling ass, which adds to sprints like that, but it’s not going to happen. You mentioned the sled dogs and the blueberries, and that piqued your interest in nutrition. Let's talk nutrition. You have worked with Brent Ruby and a couple of people over at NTDC. It's not MTDC anymore, correct?

It's NTDP. It’s different terms. They're the nutrition people for the Forest Service. They're the physiology and nutrition folks of the Forest Service. Dr. Brent Ruby is a PhD in Exercise Physiology. He also has worked plenty in nutrition. That's what his research is in as well.

You worked with all these people and this is your passion project. You've decided to make an education out of it. You are also trying to use this to quite literally go into space, which is pretty cool. What is your definition of nutrition? I know that's a loaded and broad topic, but let's relate it to firefighters. Everybody bitches about the sack lunches and the chow that we get from the caterers. Let's just face it, it's garbage. What's your ideal state here and why?

Ideally for me, what we need to be doing is addressing the year as a whole, and talking about something we call periodization, which is essentially attacking nutrition in the seasons of life. We have different seasons that we're in. Obviously, the fire season is what we would consider the in-season. We roll into October, which would be the postseason. We have the entire off-season and then we have the pre-season. Nutrition and exercise work the same way, so it's all periodization. It's all trying to periodize how we eat food. Nutrition to me is a sustainable way of fueling yourself in your life. How can you fuel yourself sustainably for the rest of your life? With firefighters specifically, we'd love perfect nutrition on incidents and stuff like that.

That's one of the things that we're addressing. What I'm trying to address are two things. The first thing is policy. We want to address what the policy states as far as what is required from caterers. It's not horrible. It's not bad. There has been a lot of work that has been done on the policy, and it does specify giving us a certain amount of meat, giving us a certain amount of carbohydrates and everything, and meeting calorie counts. They did do a study back in 2018, I believe it was Dr. Alexander Marks that did the study where they sent 125 individuals out to incidents. I have talked with people who have been a part of this study, different crews and whatnot, different foremen, and superintendents that were part of the research.

They sent 125 individuals out, 86 of those, they actually used the information from. What they did is they tracked food on incidents with the crews. They went with the crews. They measured their food, exercise, activity, and everything to calculate their total daily energy expenditures. Essentially how much energy they're spending every day. They did all this research and all this observation. It came back and it said that they were being given the right amount of nutrients as far as calories go and as far as macronutrients go. The quantities are there. For me, the next step sounds like it's the quality. It’s addressing one thing at a time and what we can do to improve.

For example, my goal is to address and observe the quality of protein that’s being fed to firefighters in type one and two incidents with caterers involved. What's the quality of the protein? What can we do to fix the protein? As much as I would love to say, “We need to fix vitamin C and biotin, and all these other things that we could fix.” Let's focus on one thing at a time. What can we do to fix the quality of protein? That's a policy thing. What can we do to revise the policy to include grass-fed beef? We can go into why that's important.

I'm not just saying grass-fed beef out there. I understand what that sounds like. Grass-fed beef is essentially a lot lower in omega 6s than omega 3s. It promotes anti-inflammation. Grass-fed beef is fantastic. It's more than just grain versus grass and this whole argument. That's an example of one of the things we could require for the dinner. Three nights a week, we require some meals with 4 ounces per firefighter of grass-fed beef. That could be an example of a policy.

It’s like low-hanging fruit. How do we direct policy to get rid of the meat wad sandwich? There's something right there with the rainbow beef.

The purple roast beef that you get. I guess roast beef is the mystery meat. That's another one of those things, and I know it's frustrating. Let's say a food unit leader is listening to this. They're like, “That's what I order and that's what I can order. I'm doing my best to provide that for the firefighters.” As we talked about earlier, the problem is not a people problem. The people that are involved in this whole thing all care.

The people that are making the lunches, the people that are distributing the lunches, all the volunteers that are included, the logistics to get the meals to the firefighters, everything that's going on is done by people that care about firefighters. It's not a people problem. It's a policy thing. There’s also an education portion, which is the second thing that I'm trying to work on. It’s providing or creating a program that essentially educates firefighters and logistics teams, food unit leaders, ordering managers, and everything. It educates them on what good nutrition is.

It's not a people problem; it's just a policy thing.

As we talked about, not a lot of people know that getting your guys donuts, pancakes, and stuff like that in the morning, which pancakes are included in the ordering specifications as being required in breakfast I believe. I have it pulled up here. They require 3 to 4 ounces of pancakes, French toast, or waffles. That's part of the requirement for the specification for catering. If anyone is tuning in and wants to look it up, it's D.1.7 of the specifications for the catering done in 2021, that new contract that was released.

It's pretty impressive as far as accounting for the nutrients and getting guys. The fact that they went as far as to make sure they were getting the right amount of calories and macronutrients, there was a lot of work that was done to do that. There was a lot of work that went into revising policy to make that stuff happen. Dr. Ruby has been doing this for 25-plus years. What can we do to push it further? That second portion is the education piece. Not only are we trying to push research. We're trying to bridge the gap between research and firefighters.

We're trying to take what they've done for the past couple of decades, and then digest it in a way that makes sense to the firefighter, give it to them, and then they can look at that and say, “That's how much protein I need to eat. These are the micronutrients I need. This is what they do.” Giving them something actionable. Even further, how should they eat in the off-season? We don't spend most of our time on incidents. We spend most of our life off incidents. I would venture to say 80% to 90% of our year is spent away from fire incidents. How are we eating outside of that? The best analogy I've heard is comparing it to money. Let's say you have a big expense coming up and you want to go on a big vacation. You want to take this big vacation that requires a lot of money, but it's in two years from now.

You're going to start saving up for that. You're going to budget. You're going to create these good habits because it's important to you. You're going to create good habits to save money and prepare. By the time it comes, you can afford to take that vacation. It might still cost you money, but you can afford to take it because you've been preparing for it. The same thing is true for food. We have the whole off-season and the preseason to prepare. We don't just want to go into the season saying, “Screw it. My nutrition is going to be trash anyway. I might as well not care about it.”

We want to be proactive about it. We want to budget for the season. We want to have good habits and establish good nutrition prior to that. By the time the season hits, we can at least afford to go overboard a little bit and fall off the wagon for lack of a better phrase. It’s the same thing as money. That's the easiest way I've put it to people.

Besides the actual nutrition and the education component of it, and changing and directing policy, I'm very well aware of the fact of the cost-utility and the shelf life utility of some of the stuff that they feed us. Did you see a way around some of those things? I'm trying to wrap my head around that, and I just don't know. You're a professional in this industry. You're the subject matter expert. How do we address the processed foods that have an infinite shelf life like no expiration date?

During COVID, a lot of stuff changed. A lot was impacted. I've spoken to these crews and they said, “One of the things that we loved was that they were able to get us,” and this doesn't go over places like Alaska where you have food flown into you and stuff like that. For the majority of places, the logistics teams were doing a good job of getting food and stuff to the guys that weren't MREs. It might not have been done everywhere, but they showed at least that it's possible to get food from camp to crews that are spiked out on the line. They showed that they can still do that to avoid MREs whenever they can.

Personally, I don't have the expertise to go in and reinvent the wheel with MREs. We could say that natural preservatives work well, and that could be used for meats. To say that I can go in and create a new MRE right now, I just can't do it. Instead of doing that, I think it's addressing the logistics and saying it is possible because we've done it to get food to the guys out on the line. Let's see if we can continue to do that outside of COVID. That's the logistics piece. The money piece is where the policy stuff is. I use the term “policy” broadly. I've been working with Max Alonzo with NFFE. It’s like the union for us.

Max has been awesome and they've been doing all kinds of work in Washington, going out and lobbying. I know that one of my buddies is out here close by on the Hotshot Crew. He's been going out and lobbying with them as well and addressing some of the stuff that's coming down the pipe, and all the new bills that are coming across that they're trying to get through right now.

The presidential budget for 2024.

They have been lobbying, trying to make sure that that gets passed. They've been doing all kinds of work. He's got a foot in the door and he has their ear. That's the important thing. You have someone with a foot in the door, and you have someone that has their attention. I'm working with him since we have the attention right now. It's the best time to bring this stuff up. We're taking all the research. We're compiling it all. What we're trying to do is identify the importance of nutrition for firefighters, and make it blatantly obvious because you talk to crews and talk to firefighters, we're all very receptive to good nutrition. We all know that it matters. It's very obvious to us.

You would put this octane in a Ferrari though. That's the same thing.

It's obvious to us and to the folks that are on the line or the folks that understand the job that nutrition is important, but for those on the outside, it's not as obvious. Taking that information and presenting it in a way that makes it understandably obvious to them is probably the best bet at getting us more financing to do that. Are we there yet? No. Do they understand how difficult it is? No. Do they understand nutrition? No, but we're working on it. Over the past two years, we've seen that increase in pay, and we've seen that there is an interest in helping. Right now, while the momentum is there, we're trying to take advantage of it. That's the purpose behind what we're doing right now.

No, it's definitely hard to jump onto a moving train, so to speak. If the window is there and you can catch that train by all means, now is the time to do it. We don't know what the next 4 or 8 years look like. I don't have a crystal ball, but we don't know what it's going to look like. Hopefully, we can get something passed up the chain and back down the line to something digestible for the boots on the ground. Even something like a handy dandy, like an IRPG for nutrition per se. Something as simple as that, just guidelines and also weaving these new discoveries and this research into policy. That's a critical component of it as well.

Down here, what I'm working on locally is we get a lot of out-of-area resources once severity hits for us. We have a lot of folks who come from Montana or California. We have folks here right now from California and New Mexico and Northern Arizona that are here. They can come to the desert and we can tell them all we want, “Drink more water. It's hot outside.” It's hot outside, they should be drinking more water. How much water do you drink? How many milligrams of sodium do you consume?

When we're talking about water, Dr. Brent Ruby's research says that we have to expend anywhere from 6 to 10 liters of water every day when we're vigorously working on the line. That's anywhere from 1.5 gallons to over 2 gallons of water or 1.5 gallons to 2.5 gallons of water, around there, or 6 to 10 liters because we don't use the metric system here. Everything is in liters and kilograms, so I'll end up making a conversion for everybody to make it easy.

Research says that we expend anywhere from six to 10 liters of water every day when we're vigorously working on the line.

It’s like learning your multiplication tables in high school or elementary school rather.

Fun fact, your weight is in kilograms, just divide your weight in pounds divided by 2.2. That's your weight in kilograms. That's how all of the nutrition usually is. All your micronutrients or macronutrients are in grams per kilogram or they're in milligrams or micrograms. They're not in anything that looks like you should even know what it is.

You need one teaspoon of MTC oil and Vitamin C.

What we do for the outer area resources that come in, especially when it gets busy, is I created essentially a quick little checklist of, “Here's the amount of water you should be drinking, and here's the amount of sodium you should be drinking.” For firefighters that are on incidents, they were getting around 6,000 milligrams of sodium a day just from food, which is fine. The recommended intake is 1,500. For firefighters, it needs to be a lot more. You can safely consume 5,000 to 6,000 and be completely fine. You're not going to have hypertension or anything like that. That's the education portion though.

What about the other things, like electrolytes and potassium? Magnesium is one of them too.

It’s sodium and potassium chloride. Magnesium’s a little bit of it, but it's mainly sodium and potassium because that is what the intestines use to absorb water essentially. It’s mainly sodium and potassium. That comes to the individual like tracking food and understanding where you are, but if you're only getting about 1,500 to 2,000 milligrams, and you feel like you're dehydrated, even though you're drinking a lot of water, you're probably deficient in sodium.

Up that by 1,000 or 2,000 and see how you feel, and then go up to anywhere from 4,000 to 6,000. All that stuff is very individual when you're talking about nutrition. If you're tuning in to this and you're wondering about your nutrition, it's going to come down to you as an individual. It's going to depend on you. Your biofeedback is what we call it, the cotton mouth you get, your digestion, your stools, and whatnot.

You feel like you're dragging ass.

If your energy is crazy low and you constantly feel like you're thirsty, even though you drink enough water, chances are you need more sodium and potassium. Potassium can be a little bit tougher to get enough of. That's why I have a list of things. I'm not a dietitian so I can't legally say you need to drink this, but I can give recommendations.

They're not, but I am. I'm just kidding. I'm independent. Something from my experience that would help me out is something called Nuun. They're little vials and you drop one of those in your canteen. Whenever it felt like I was dragging ass or I felt like I was super dehydrated even though I was chugging water, I'd pop one of those things in my canteen and pound that thing, and it's great. It's better than Gatorade. Not a lot of sugar, but it worked for me.

They're easy. You can carry it on your pack and they don't go bad. I carry around a little bag of pink Himalayan salt. A teaspoon of that is about 1,600 milligrams of sodium. I won't name-drop anybody specifically, but the problem with a lot of the electrolyte mixes is that they don't have enough sodium. They have very minimal amounts. I think the most I've seen in one is 1,000, but to buy that particular brand it's 45 for a 16-pack.

Whereas you can go to the store and get a thing of pink Himalayan salt for a few bucks and a thing called MiO, and squirt MiO in your drink and put some Himalayan salt in there and you have 1,600 milligrams of sodium right there. It was significantly cheaper. Obviously, we get paid so much, so we're all about cheap circumvention of expensive things.

I know which ones you're talking about. I reached out to those guys. I mentioned them or something like that because I bought some, and they sent me a couple of them. It was Element. They're expensive though, but they're good. They don't taste like shit either. I'm not sponsored by those guys. That's not a paid thing. I'm not getting paid for that or the Nuun thing and neither are you.

They're good because they have 1,000 milligrams of sodium. When we're not getting paid very much. I'm looking into that as well. Maybe we get some sponsorship or maybe guys are allowed to purchase that with purchase cards. Maybe that's something that we can do like what kind of Federal funds. That could be one of the things that we fund, proper electrolyte mix and stuff like that, so guys can have it on their packs instead of carrying around a Ziploc bag of salt. Even though, it works pretty similar.

Potassium, outside of that, you're looking at stuff like a lot of bananas or coconut water is incredibly high in potassium. That's why I like to hear from crews and people because as you said, it’s your personal experience or something that personally helped you. Something that I'm trying to work on right now is getting a survey. I’m trying to make contacts. I'm trying to network as much as possible and get as many people from as many regions on board. We'll probably do it over Facebook. It’s where we'll start.

What I’m trying to do is create a Facebook forum that will be accessible to every wildland firefighter that can get into it. It’s going to be a big forum on nutrition and holistic wellness essentially. I say holistic wellness loosely. That means stuff that you can do yourself to improve your well-being and the well-being of your crew. Creating a central location, which there is one from the Forest Service, and Dr. Ruby worked on it. It's called TheBlackPerformance.net. I don't know if you've heard of it.

I'd never even heard of it until you mentioned it.

It's called TheBlackPerformance.net, it’s essentially the shell of what we're trying to do. It gives the energy demands of firefighters and the proper nutrition, but it's not complete because from what I understand, the interest in funding did not go the way that they thought it would.

Was it adoption or funding?

I believe it was funding, but don't quote me on it because I'm not sure. I'd have to talk to him again about it. The idea behind it is fantastic. Get a central location where we can all get together and look and see, "This is what I should be doing,” and give us a number. If you go and look at stuff right now, you can't find the proper protein intakes for wildland firefighters, anywhere else except for his research.

It’s just bro science pretty much for the most part out there.

You tell a wildland firefighter or ask anybody, and they shouldn't know the answer because none of us have the time to go out and do this on our own. Going into severity, I work six tens on an engine. On an engine, I'll get 800 hours of overtime in peak season. You're talking about Hotshot Crews that have 1,000 to 1,200 hours of overtime. You look at that and you're like, “Nobody has time to go out.” Not at all. We can't expect them to do it either. Ask them how many carbohydrates they should be eating every day. They'll probably say, “I don't know. Maybe 250 to 300.” During the season, depending on your age, height, weight, and your individual factors, it should be anywhere from 480 to 600 grams of carbs. It’s a lot. If you're not used to eating that much, you're going to look at that and say, “Absolutely not.”

We can't expect wildland firefighters to have the time to research nutrition on their own.

“What do you mean put 600 grams?”

That's the importance of having that location, having a year-round place to go to, and having a year-long plan and not just looking at stuff as the fire season. What are you doing outside of the fire season? You can work up to that amount. Personally, I'm a small dude. I'm 5'7", 175 pounds. I'm 26 years old and I'm eating 480 grams of carbs right now. I don't gain or lose weight, but that's because of what I've been doing in the past six months to prepare for the fire season. I've seen everything improve personally. We talk to guys on my crew. We talk through what they eat for breakfast and dinner.

I work with them and they'll see an immediate two-minute decrease in their hike time up to one of the hikes that we time. Literally, one of our guys had a breakfast of oats and a banana. He saw his time decrease by two minutes. The next time we were like, “What did you eat for dinner?” We talked about his dinner and getting the complex carbs in rice and potatoes. He saw another 30 seconds go off his time. There's a lot of stuff that goes into that, but the point of that is to say that there are going to be improvements when you work on nutrition. We know that. Where can you find this stuff to help yourself? That's what we're trying to develop. It’s a central location for all that.

That's powerful tools. That's another thing too, as long as the awareness is out there. I had another health and nutrition coach on the show by the name of Paul. He's more of the meat-based, meat-centric diet. Not carnivore, but protein-based. He was saying a lot of the same things. He's a private guy and you’re a private practitioner. He takes on clients and does individualized stuff for his clients. The problem is the baseline information is relatively standardized, but it's nowhere to be found at the same time. To have something that's easy to understand and have it in one location, and then custom-tailor it based on your biofeedback, that's good shit.

All of these, I'm trying to do through the agency. I'd love to provide it through the agency, That's the goal. Create a program within the agency that everybody has access to that they don't have to pay for. As a coach, we're not cheap. I don't take on a lot of clients and I'm not working right now. I'm not doing any of that. I'm not going to shovel anything out there because I'm solely focused on fire, nutrition, and doing this. When I was working with clients, they were paying me quite a bit of money.

You're giving some gift of health and longevity. That's the thing. Why wouldn’t you invest in yourself?

It's more than just food. How is your sleep when you can get it? What can we do to improve your sleep? How are you managing stress? That's something that the agency has been big on in the past couple of years. It has been mental health, which is phenomenal. We've seen a lot of leaps and bounds in mental health in the last couple of years. One of the ways that we've been framing it to get some buy-in too is nutrition has a huge impact on your mental health. The amount of impact it has on your hormones is substantial. Generally, you feel good when you're eating well. You feel good and generally, life is better.

When life is better, stress is lower. As firefighters, our stress is jacked up. Our cortisol is a mess. What can we do to manage that? It's stuff outside of food. I don't work with food with my clients probably for the first two months. You give yourself four hours to sleep every night. Start giving yourself six every night, and then we'll come back to it in a couple of weeks when you do that every day. How much water are you drinking? Let's drink a little bit more, and then we work our way up to these things. Eventually, once we have a good baseline of sleep and stress mitigation, and water intake, then we can say, “Now let's focus on your food.”

Playing the long-term with firefighters is also important. If you're tuning in now, you can make these immediate improvements. You can start eating more food, eating more protein, eating more carbs, and I say more. I can give specific numbers. I would say 1.8 grams per kilogram of protein. You take your body weight and divide it by 2.2. That's your weight in kilograms. You multiply that by 1.8 and that's the amount of protein you should be getting every day. If you're nowhere near that, just start incrementally increasing it as you go week by week, and work up to that number.

Don't overload yourself right away. Protein is very satiating. It makes you full pretty quickly. Don't overload right away, but that would be the goal for you. It is to get to that number, and then carbs too. Carbs are very individual, and they vary. For me personally, my TDEE, or how much energy I spend in the fire season is right around 4,800 calories. Of that, I want about 50% to 55% in carbohydrates. I can give that to you if you want.

I can create something like a little spreadsheet of this is how you calculate stuff, but your calories are anywhere from 50% to 55% of those calories. It should be from carbohydrates, and that's a lot. I would say about 480 right now is where I'm at. It's anywhere from 460 to 480 grams of carbs. If you're nowhere near that, incrementally work your way up. It's about educating and giving guys actionable things to work on.

Here's another question for you, small dudes like me. I'm only 5’8” and I weigh 155. You said you're 5’7 and weigh 170. Small dudes like us have a hard time. At least I have a hard time packing in food. When you say something like 4,000 or 4,800 calories, that's a lot of food. I know there are some cheats to that. Supplement with a protein drinker or weight gainer. As far as real food and doing it the real food method, that's a lot. Do you get any tips and tricks for people that pile it on real food, not supplements?

I try to steer clear of supplements. As far as getting more food, that amount of food for the firefighter is the food you need when you get on an assignment. That's the food you need. We generally don't have a hard time eating that much food when we're working like that. Guys that are tuning in, if you're working that hard, you’re generally hungry throughout the day. One of the things that the research shows is that increasing episodes of eating is even more effective. Increasing the amount or the number of times you eat in the day is helpful.

Is that maybe six?

I eat a lot of meals. I try to eat four big meals and I snack throughout the day. I go to Costco. I get boxes of those snacks. I try to get those calories. I get my simple carbs. I get complex carbs. I used to have a cup of rice for dinner with the chicken. The rice thing out there is boring as it sounds. I like chicken alfredo with rice. That's what I'm doing right now. I meal prep my food and it changes every week. Right now I have chicken alfredo with rice. I used to do a cup, but now I do two cups.

Pasta is another example. I have pasta with meat sauce or meatballs or something like that. Instead of doing 56 ounces of dried pasta, I do two servings of that. Just increasing serving sizes. It's doing things incrementally over time and not doing things right away. If you're only eating 2,000 calories, start next week by eating 2,200 a week, and then the week after that, eat 2,400 a week. Just small changes over time.

Especially in those soldier seasons. I can understand that you want to probably ramp up your caloric intake. Before you start training in the preseason, ramp it up to where you're at good maintenance, and maybe bulk up a little bit. Eventually, you're going to start losing. You're going to go into a caloric deficit over the season. You're going to start losing weight. I don't know if there's a way around that where you can maintain an average weight. Going through that, trying to maintain through the summer, and then ramping down towards the winter. That's one of those things that you're talking about as well.

One of the guests you had is Michelle Yurick. She was talking about that too. Not going into the season completely shredded for the rest of your life. You should try to be in the best shape of your life as far as you should try to be as physically well off as you can be. You shouldn’t be just full going into the season. You should be in a caloric surplus going into the season because you are going to lose it. It is inevitable that you're going to lose weight at some point. This is the budgeting thing we talked about, and the importance of nutrition in the off-season. If you are proactive about it, you can afford that. Going to the season and bulking up a little bit is definitely important.

There was this Smokey Generation project. What they did was a Canadian crew or a unit crew, I believe it’s their version of Hotshots., they took a photo of each crew member from the beginning of the season through their training all the way through the summer. It went from gaining weight and then it was dwindling, like bags into their eyes. Fatigue is setting in and they're losing tons of weight. By the end of their season when they wrapped up this project or this photo series, they all looked like Skeletor. It was bad.

It's inevitable that you'll lose something. At least from my experience, it's inevitable. You can go in as prepared as you want because it's the nature of the job. As a human, we are not meant to be doing that right now. We are not meant to be taking 50,000 steps a day for two weeks straight, and having no sleep. All that stress is inflicted on us. Coming back for three days off, and then going back out again for two weeks and doing that for as long as we do it, the body is not meant for that.

It's not a sustainable model.

I definitely would not call it a sustainable model. It's definitely not a job if you want to live a long time. It is a job that guys love. I understand completely the addictive side of it, and how there's a purpose behind it. Guys enjoy it. They enjoy not only the work, but they enjoy the people involved and the camaraderie that it provides and everything like that. Coming from the Marine Corps into that, I see why guys do this for a living. It makes complete sense. That's what the off-season is for. It is trying to get back that longevity that you missed out on in the in-season when you're focused on performance.

Another thing with periodization comes, what is your goal during that period? When we're in season, our goal is performance. We're all about performance, but we have a triangle that we look at. On one point of the triangle, you have your performance. On one side, you have longevity. On the other side, you have aesthetics. The more you push toward one point of the triangle, the more you are pulled away from the other two. The more we drive toward performance, the more we are pulling away from both longevity and aesthetics. In the off-season, our focus should shift to longevity in the postseason where we're focused on mobility, stability, and recovery.

The more we drive toward performance, the more we are pulling away from both longevity and aesthetics.

If you want to focus on aesthetics with still some longevity, keep yourself aesthetic and longevity based. Since your metabolism is where it is, where you're eating all this food, go into that and try to build muscle from there. Try to build that muscle to add to the stability of your joints and try to maintain yourself, and you can create aesthetics. That's for longevity, and create that good muscular foundation, and then come back up again, and work on that caloric surplus going to the preseason. Understanding that triangle is a good visual for guys to know that you don't always have to live this high-performance lifestyle in the off-season, which is something that I screwed up too.

I screwed that up completely. This past year, I still didn't do it because I wanted to race dogs in the off-season. I come down here, so my off-season was spent racing dogs in Alaska. In my in-season, I'm now firefighting, and then my off-season probably should not be racing, but it probably will be again. I’m trying to find a way though to make that as little physically demanding as possible. We all want to enjoy our off-season too but try to give yourself a break and give your body a break.

It's okay to veg out and play video games every once in a while.

That's fine. You should do that for the first month you're done with the season. Keep your body at rest.

There's also that party boy and party girl lifestyle that firefighters typically lead. I know we got a little bit of an issue with binge drinking and just drinking and substances in general. That's another thing too. Let's talk about alcohol if you would like to. Alcohol is a massive detriment to anything physiological, from my understanding. It fucks up your sleep. It fucks up your hormones. It literally makes you dumb after a while if you're pouring it on the sauce. What else does it do? It interrupts your hormones and does a bunch of terrible shit. We're known for partying. Let's talk about alcohol.

We definitely are. Full disclosure, I was 19 when I went to AAA. As a Marine, when I first got in, I got cheated on. I lived with 200 alcoholics, so that's what you did. I partied from a young age and I did it for a while. Eventually, I went to AAA and figured things out a little bit, but I still drank a lot after that. I still went out and hung out with friends. Over the years, and especially this last year has been probably the healthiest relationship I've had with alcohol in my life. It's not just alcohol but it's the same with food. Trying to develop a good relationship with it is important. I will never tell a client that enjoys drinking wine at the end of the night. Let's say they like having a beer or a wine.

I'll never tell them to completely get rid of that. If that's something they enjoy, then by all means you should do it. Understanding the relationship between it and the quantity and what it does to you is important. How does that make you feel? How does the alcohol make you feel? Do you enjoy being completely hungover the next day and losing an entire day the next day?

Understanding your relationship with alcohol and what it does to you is important.

I'm 36 years old. If I drink too much, I'm fucked up for two days. I get two-day hangovers. I can't get out of bed without 800 of ibuprofen on board.

As an agency, I think we've seen quite a bit of incidents that have occurred due to alcohol. We've all had our personal experiences in the agency with incidents that have happened due to alcohol. Going dry and cutting it off completely is hard to do because we all enjoy a stressful shift. Coming back and going out, having a beer with our crew, or going out and having a drink with everybody, and unwinding, you shouldn't cut that out. Do you need to go get messed up? How does that make you feel the next day? Do you enjoy being hung over the next day? What does that relationship look like?

I'm guilty of it too. I've been blacked out, not blacked out on duty, but I’ve been blacked out the night before. I woke up and got in the buggy, and then time traveled across the United States in the back of a buggy. That shit happens. Do I do that shit anymore? Maybe once in a blue moon, but I become the master of the Irish Goodbye. Sorry, Paul Peterson, I Irish Goodbyed on your retirement party, but I saw the writing on the wall, brother.

It's expensive too. Your retention pay is not for alcohol.

Your retention pay is not for alcohol.

Save that shit. Don't get drunk every weekend and buy a fucking Tacoma.

So much debt that ends up in the parking lot next season.

This is my down payment on my house which is actually a vehicle. Don't get me started on that one. I'm not going to go down that route. As far as the data that's currently out there with nutrition data, we were talking a little bit before, and we came to the conclusion mutually that it's a little bit antiquated per se. What are your thoughts on that?

I would say it's slightly a little bit antiquated. It's not that bad though. The most recent research and all that observational stuff as far as nutrition goes is from 2018. That's one I was talking about where they sent those guys out to the different crews to observe what they were eating on incidents. I don't think the issue is that it's outdated necessarily. I think the issue is that it's only on assignments, so you don't get a good idea of what the actual firefighter's nutrition looks like throughout the year.

That's a clarifying point.

I would love to know that, and that’s very hard with human subjects. It's very hard to do research like that because that is requiring someone to track their food for an entire year.

You pay your researchers for that. It's not like the intern is going to be showing up at your house and be like, “What did you eat today?”

If that's the case, you're relying on a lot of self-reported data. Going into what that looks like for research, it's very hard to create legitimate research about that. I don't think it's so much that the research is antiquated. I think it's hard to gauge what it is. I don't even want to call it incomplete because the research they did is it's good for what we need. It's good for showing us what we're fed on incidents, but it's not the full year, so it's hard to tell.

It's not necessarily tracking what you're eating at the gas station when you have a piss break or a fuel break with the buggies or the engine. Sometimes that's all you got. I used to keep a little small food box of snacks, something that's pretty good like pro bars or whatever I could find that was decent food. It was going to last. I think there's a lot of personal accountability in this whole nutrition game as well. That's one of the overlooked things because we're waiting on the agency to fix a lot of shit. Look at the DIL and the presidential pay or budget proposal. If we're waiting on the government to do anything, we're going to be holding our breaths for a long time. This personal accountability thing takes a huge role in this.

Having that platform that guys can all get together in one location to talk to each other about it. You had your own personal method for finding those nutrients, feeding yourself, and taking care of yourself. It's a lot easier if we have ways to talk to each other and get information and recommendations for how to take care of stuff. Having a central location, a forum that people could get on and ask questions, and get answered by individuals that have the experience. The connection is missing because a lot of times, it's very hard to show the human factor in the research.

It's very hard to show people's individual habits and whatnot through scientific research. That's where working with individuals and using research, so being evidence-based but not evidence bound comes in. All the decisions we make and all the recommendations we make are evidence-based, but they're also taking into account you as an individual, your personal habits, food preferences, and lifestyle. Having a location they can come to get recommendations and advice from, that's the goal for everything.

That's the end goal. I hope it helps point people in the right direction. I hope people that are higher up in the chain are making policy. I hope that the policy and decision-makers in our government are looking at this too because then they can take a little bit of guidance and implement it into a new policy. As we’re talking about earlier, they change the policy in 2021. They changed everything from the closest available resource to the most affordable resource.

That was one of the big changes that came from prioritizing the cheapest catering over the closest catering. They contract caterers to be ready. Essentially they pay caterers in areas to be ready to be called to a fire. What that policy says now is of those contracted caterers, order the cheaper one. It's incentivizing caterers to provide cheaper food. We don't need research or anything to tell us that that's not a good thing for firefighters’ health or safety. We have plenty of research that shows that anyway. We don't need it but we have it. That's another thing that we love to address with what we're doing.

That's why I put a hold on the observational research that I was doing because I want to work on this education program and proposal to the agencies. That’s probably done in 2024. It is the same format as what they did in 2018, but I'm going to push to it in 2024 where we can see the impact of that policy. We can see that that's what it was in 2018, but this is where it is now, and give them a comparison of where things have gone in the last couple of years. That would be something that we're going to be geared toward for 2024.

I'm concerned because it's that whole triangle, speaking of triangles and visualizing data. In commerce, you have fast, cheap, and quality. Pick two, if you're prioritizing cheap and fast, your quality is going to suck. There are no two ways around it. I'm concerned about the overall welfare, health, and safety component as well for the folks out there with this new policy change or this new contract change.

Granted, there are some contractors out there that are in it to make a buck. There are also contractors like food caterer contractors out there to do a good job and make an impression on firefighters. I've had some amazing fire meals from caterers before. I've had also one sausage with a bunch of gravy over a waffle. It's like, “What the fuck is this?”

That meets calories, but I don't know what I'm looking at.

It's questionable. They're putting those little canned sausages or whatever they are in your meal.

I need more than two hands to tell you the number of times I've been given a frozen burrito. I get it that was an attempt to put calories in front of me and get me stuff, but I was so surprised the first time I got a frozen burrito in a packed lunch.

It's humiliating. It's insulting. It's like, “Are you serious? I'm spiked out on top of the hill and this is what you gave us, a cooler full of frozen burritos to eat in the morning?”

You throw it on a dashboard and it heats up eventually.

You throw it on a shovel and put it in a stump hole or something like that.

The people putting the lunches together or the people that are ordering stuff, they care but that education piece is lacking.

The people putting the lunches together care. But that education piece is lacking.

That's another thing too though. Do you want to go into the insulin spike and the hazard that it presents? There's anecdotal evidence out there like lunchtime and its correlation to insulin spike and drop. You get tired and get complacent. It feels like you have a gut bomb and ate a handful of Xanax at the same time, but also that 2:00 burn period when all accidents tend to happen. There's anecdotal evidence that the meals can be a contributing factor to decision-making and safety. Do you want to explore that or do you want to not even touch that topic?

I definitely have some, and it'd be more speculation based on my knowledge of what that could be. I'm pretty confident that this is what it is. With cortisol specifically, we have two main times throughout the day that it spikes. The first time is when we wake up in the morning and it spikes. The second time is after we work out. As firefighters, our cortisol is jacked up, so it's very hard to say that for sure it's a cortisol decrease that's happening in the afternoon. It's very hard to gauge cortisol in firefighters because of the line of work and the lifestyle that we live. It can vary on the individual. What I would say is that chances are it's a combination of cortisol coming down from that morning spike.

Insulin itself has a counter-regulatory effect on cortisol. When we have these simple carb sugary meals like donuts or granola, our body digest it and glucose goes into the bloodstream. Our body responds by producing insulin, which pulls glucose from the bloodstream. That insulin being active is counter-regulating and dropping cortisol. That drop in cortisol could be leading to a lack of attentiveness and a lack of awareness in firefighters. That could be one of the reasons. At least this part, I know Dr. Ruby would agree with it. It's that one of the ways to mitigate that is increasing the episodes of eating, so increasing the number of times you eat every day.

As long as you're consistently feeding yourself with those simple and complex carbohydrates throughout the work shift, you should not experience that lack of attentiveness as much. Because you're constantly fueling yourself and keeping that running through you, you don't have the time for that insulin to spike up and create that fluctuation with hormones.

I'm not an expert on that, so I'm not going to say that is what's happening. If I were to guess on ways to mitigate it, it would be to increase the episodes that we're eating. Maybe you take the 5 or 10, and you give your crews a minute to sit there and eat something quick. If you can take 5 once every 2 hours to mitigate that, then that's ideal. Once every hour or two, then that would probably go a long way to mitigating any risk in that critical burn period.

That's another thing too. That 1:32 ass drag that you get after you eat lunch is one of those things that you could probably do your own due diligence on as well, by having pocket snacks and eating while winging a tool, or eating at opportune moments throughout the day. If it's not a designated break, you could still walk, chew bubble gum, and do all that shit at the same time or swing a tool at the same time. I guess it's just trying to figure it out instead of eating a massive meal all at once.

That comes back to the moral of the story earlier. It’s to create that forum. If you have that or you have those, maybe not everybody likes granola. This guy likes this and this guy like that, and you have all these ideas that come together. This is what we do for our crews. The BLM is working to implement this already, and Dr. Ruby's research is being implemented there, but getting everybody together in one place and saying, “This stuff is working for me.” We can't just wait for the research to be done. We can't just wait for the policies to be changed. We got to take a step and we got to take some action and do it ourselves, and communicate with each other on what works for us. You see Hotshot Crews, Wyoming is one of those crews that have their own traveling kitchen.

That is badass. Talk about the COVID silver lining right there. That was cool. I know there are other crews out there that did it, but Wyoming was one of the ones that publicized what they did as an example for people to follow along if they chose to. Not only did it save a shit ton of money for the agency, but it also had better nutrition all around and better performance out of the crew. It’s been noted and documented that this was the effect and outcome of their idea to build a mobile kitchen.

That comes with its own challenges. If you talk to them, the challenge would probably be we have to designate people to either wake up early or stay up later or come in early from the line to cook food or wake up early for everybody else to cook food. The logistical piece is a bit more complicated in that regard, and then you have those engine crew. Chances are we're not out on the line as much as crews. Do we have the time between six guys on one engine? Do we have the manpower to run a kitchen ourselves and do that stuff? Is that an option? Does that work for engines? I don't know of anybody that works for an engine or hell attack or anything like that.

That's why I want that forum where we can come together and talk about it. We know of Wyoming. We know that Nevada BLM is working on these things, but we don't know of the other stuff that's happening in the country right now. We just don't because there's so much going on, and there's not a place where we can come together and talk about it so let's create that. If you're tuning in, that's why I brought it up thirteen times. That's what I want. It’s a place to talk about stuff together. That's an awesome idea to have a traveling kitchen. Everybody got awesome ideas. We just don't share them with each other because we don't have a way to talk to each other.

That is true. It's the simple shit too, even word of mouth. One thing that I would always do with the engine that I was on is I would do a crew kitty fund. Everybody pitch in like $50 or $25 at the beginning of the season. I'd go to REI or wherever and get a bunch of those freeze-dried meals, which are better for you than a lot of the shit that you're getting out of the caterer or the box of MREs. It's simple stuff like workarounds. They're small and lightweight. They don't take up a lot of room and you can feed a lot of people with one of those things. Some of them are four servings. You split it up and you're good to go.

I like hearing people's table salt and MiO stories. I like hearing the individual stuff that people have because we all live on a relatively similar budget, so what works within that budget too? The only people that know best are us. The other thing that's been cool is it's been received well so far. A lot of this research and stuff, Dr. Ruby marked these and other individuals that have conducted the research in the past. They have laid the groundwork for the past couple of decades. I'm just the guy on the inside that is experiencing the lifestyle every day that has access to the research. I'm trying to take their work and give it to everybody. It is received better because I understand where we're coming from because I am a firefighter, and I am working this season.

I think that's one of the linchpins of the early adoption of new ideas. Two things that firefighters hate are the way things are and change. If you could establish some legitimacy behind it, because we're super xenophobic to a high degree. We don't like outsiders for the most part. Wildland firefighters and even structure firefighters tend to gravitate towards their own flock of people or their own flock of feathers if you will. If you establish that early adoption and have legitimacy behind it by boots on the ground, you're going to get a lot better feedback from people. A lot more people are willing to jump on board with it.

As we had talked about that research that they did in 2018 where they had the folks come out and track all the food and do all that stuff. That research, I've talked to some of the individuals involved in that, at least from the fireside, that were on those crews. They were confused because they didn't know what happened to it. They're like, “We had all this research. They've done this work, but where did it go? What happened to it? We put all the work in to do it, but it seemed like it went away.” I want that to be clear too that it didn't just go away. It was published and that's the research we're working on right now. It didn't just go away, and we're actually doing something with it now.

It always takes time to publish stuff and get stuff rolling. The fact that we have a way to apply it and some ears to listen now, we have some momentum for it now. Getting participation from people and people reaching out to me and letting me know their experiences is huge for me. It doesn't mean I'm just throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping stuff sticks. I need stuff that people think is helpful. I think it would be incredibly helpful, if it's not, then I need people to tell me that and say, “That's not what we need. We need this instead.” Coming up with that thing that people need the most is what we're trying to do.

I need people to be in touch. I reached out to a lot of crews. I've heard back from maybe 5 or 6 crews. I've gotten with a couple of teams down here in Region 3. All this is pretty much in its infancy and it's possibly one more person right now, but the person that's doing all this stuff for the nutrition at the moment from the forum side and this goal that I have is just me. Definitely, we need feedback from crews. I might have help here soon. I have another meeting when we're done with another person at NCDP. That's my goal. I'm trying to get that ball rolling with them too because they're the ones with the funding and the ability. I'm just the one with the outreach and the empathy. It is how I see it.

It takes an army to move things in the right direction or it takes a village, so to speak. With that, where do we find you? How do we reach out to you? When is this form going live? Where can we get our input? Where can we share our thoughts and opinions and everything like that with nutrition with the project you're working on?

There are two ways to get ahold of me right now. It's either through Instagram or email. My email is JShelley2@alaska.edu. My Instagram is @JJShelley23. Either one of those ways is fine. Get in touch with me. All I'm trying to do is hear out different methods that you guys have used to improve your crews, either nutrition or wellness as a whole, or what would be beneficial to you, or tell me that you're stoked about it and want to be a part of it. Getting more people involved creates a better representation of the issue. Both with science and outside of science, the more people we have involved in this, the more we can create a representation of the population that we have.

Getting more people involved creates a better representation of the issue.

The more we can represent you, guys, the more people participate, and the more people get in touch. It's in its infancy, so the forum hasn't started yet and I'm putting it together. I'm still juggling the fire season, school, and everything. All my free time is toward this. I get home at 6:00 PM or 7:00 PM every day, and then I sit down and work on this.

That's another thing too. You need that sample size. That's why it's critical for people to reach out to you, communicate with you, and have that constructive feedback both ways. That way, you can have an excellent quality product because it's nothing going to get changed unless you have the sample size and the data that you need.

Also, answer any questions or skepticism that people have. People are skeptical when they participate in research and it doesn't seem like it benefited them at all. People can take that the wrong way. I also want to show people that the research is being done. Here it is if you want to see it. I've talked to Dr. Ruby himself and he is a great guy because he genuinely cares about us. He's been doing this for 25-plus years. He said, “I'll help in any way I can.” Part of that is getting his research out and letting people see it for what it is.

Getting that out there but also helping where we can. Anybody can reach out to me too. If anybody has any questions about feeding your guys, like immediate questions, I would be more than happy to meet with people and help them walk through, “This is how you calculate the numbers of what to eat. This is how you coach your crew.” That is all completely free. Just hit me up and say who you are, where you're from, and what crew you're working with. I'd love to work with you for no charge because we're all part of the same agency here.

I hope that the research project goes well. I hope that the forum gets used because if it doesn't get used, it’s going to be awfully pissed some folks, the boots on the ground. How are we going to change the policy unless we have that size and that feedback?

I'll start yelling. I'll start getting mad about it. I'll let people know about it. That's the point too of making a bunch of friends. I’ll start emailing people and be like, “Get on the forum and use it. We need you there.”

I'll join it.

I'll let you know when it gets going, for sure.

Copy that. Shoot me all that info when it gets going. That way, I can push it out there and help spread the word a little bit.

I'll get you all the research and stuff that I got.

I appreciate it. We’re coming to the end of the show. I always give you the opportunity to have you give a shout-out to some homies, heroes, or mentors. Who do you get for us?

Do you mind if I shout out a podcast?

Sure.

There's a podcast that I follow vehemently. It's Mind Pump Media. They're very good for general nutrition stuff. All of my research is from the Nutritional Coaching Institute. That's whom I'm certified through. I found that institute from them. For anything exercise-related, I was on their podcast for ten minutes talking about wildland firefighter exercises. We bounced some ideas back and forth.

If you go to that and you go to episode 1996, also they shout out, “This is how you program exercise for firefighters.” They have it on there. I'm trying to get them to be more on board, and get us on there more. As far as mobility, stability, and exercise, those guys are geniuses. They're the ones that got me into nutrition in the first place. If you guys are tuning in, those guys would be the place to go to for any other exercise questions for sure.

James, I appreciate you being on the show. Hopefully, we'll get you on here again once this research has been completed and everything is launched, and get your opinion on some of these changes. You said you had to stop one of your projects to work on this new one because of the new contract, so maybe we can talk about that later.

It’s going to be a multi-year thing for sure.

I don't plan on going anywhere unless something catastrophic happens like I get hit by a bus or something.

Hopefully, don't get hit by a bus because we still need this show.

Thank you. I appreciate it. I hope everybody enjoyed the show and got some tasty tidbits out of this. Thanks for tuning in.

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There we go, ladies and gentlemen. Another episode of The Anchor Point. It is going to be in the books with my good friend James Shelley. I'm sorry about that, but when you first approached me, I thought this was going to be about nutrition, like the actual stuff that you put in your body, not policy. You threw me for a loop, but it was a good surprise. If you want to change the game on the ground, this is how you do it. If you want to hit up James on his Instagram, you can go visit his @JJShelley23. He'll answer any questions that you happen to have.

Once again, James, thank you so much for being on the show and sharing some of your professional wisdom. Hopefully, we can move forward and get these things changed for the boots on the ground. I hope everybody is doing well. I hope everybody is recovering from Canada. It's pretty gnarly. Seems like they can't get a break and it still keeps on going, unfortunately. I hope everybody is doing well.

Special shout out to our sponsors. We've got MYSTERY RANCH, built for the mission. If you want to find out more about their Backbone series, go over to www.MysteryRanch.com and check it out. We've got Hotshot Brewery. They are purveyors of the most kickass coffee for a kickass cause. If you want to find out more, go over to www.HotshotBrewing.com, where you can get all of your tools of the trade, kickass coffee, and apparel to suit your needs.

We've got the A.S.S. Movement, my bro Booze over there is slinging that poo-bearing propaganda. Keep on doing what you're doing. Go over to www.TheFireWild.com and check out the A.S.S. Movement and use that code that I was talking about because you can get 10% off your order. Last but not least, we've got the Smokey Generation. She is building a catalog of wildland firefighters stories across the globe and it's all located at www.WildfireExperience.org. It's awesome. Bethany, you have a kickass organization over there. Keep it up. As for the rest of you, you all know the drill. Stay safe, stay savage. Peace.

Important Links 

• James Shelley - Instagram

• www.MysteryRanch.com

• Wildland Firefighter Foundation

• www.HotshotBrewing.com

• The A.S.S. Movement

• www.TheFireWild.com

• Paul Tijerina - past episode

• TheBlackPerformance.net

• Michelle Yurick - past episode

• JShelley2@alaska.edu

• www.WildfireExperience.org

About James Shelley

My name is James Shelley and I am with Engine 337 on the Mesa Ranger District of the Tonto National Forest. I came into fire in 2019, after leaving the Marine Corps where I had spent four years as an infantryman. I am also currently a dietetics student with the University of Alaska. I first found a passion for nutrition while working as a dog musher in Alaska. There, I had seen the enormous benefits of nutrition for racing dogs and started to piece together how important it was for the lifestyle I live. Alongside school, I went out and got certified through the Nutritional Coaching Institute as an applied nutrition coach. I gained experience working with military personnel, firefighters, climbers, hunters, and individuals that live irregular lifestyles. That is when I saw a niche for helping my community of wildland firefighters. Now, it is my goal to establish an agency-wide nutrition education program as well as aid in the revision of policies impacting our nutrition.