Colorado Springs – Juliet Draper can bench press 275 pounds and dead-lift nearly a quarter of a ton.
The area from the Colorado Springs firefighter’s biceps to her shoulders looks like a topographical map of the Alps. Her back has more rock-hard muscle than an airport steak.
But it is not the outside of Juliet Draper that makes her most interesting. It is a couple of things you cannot see. Her heart. And her soul.
When she sits and she talks about the obstacles she’s faced – if being openly gay isn’t challenge enough, how does being homeless and living on the streets of Cleveland grab you? – you see that the 39-year-old’s greatest strength is showing how far back a person can come.
Draper, a firefighter and paramedic who has been with the Colorado Springs Fire Department since 1997, is the women’s world-record holder in the Firefighter Combat Challenge, a lung-bursting series of five brutal events.
Ladies: Want to try just one of the five? OK. Make your husband lie down and pretend to be unconscious. (To make that part more believable you might want to put the TV remote control on his chest.) Now get your hands under his armpits and drag him across the room, out the door, down the steps, along the driveway and about 75 additional feet down the road. If it took more than 20 seconds, the Firefighter Combat Challenge is probably not for you.
But it definitely is for Draper, who stands 5-foot-9 and weighs about 180 pounds.
She has run to the top of a five-story tower with a 45-pound fire-hose pack on her back. She has used a rope to hoist, hand- over-hand, another 45-pound pack to the top of the tower. Then she has raced back down the same stairs and moved a 165-pound steel girder five feet by pounding it with a 9-pound sledgehammer. She has sprinted through a 140-foot course, grabbed a fire hose full of water, and dragged the 240-pound hose 75 feet and hit a target with the water blast. This was followed by dragging a 175-pound dummy 100 feet to the finish line.
She has done all of that in 2 minutes and 3 seconds. No other female firefighter has ever come close to that mark. This Friday, in Westminster, she will try to beat her own world record in the annual competition and also will try to complete the challenge in less than 2 minutes. That would qualify her for the men’s open division at the Nov. 11 World Firefighter Challenge in Nevada.
Draper is also the 2004 World Police and Fire Games women’s powerlifting champion and the 2005 State Games of America women’s powerlifting champion. She earned her paramedic badge a few years ago and is certified to administer cardiac drugs and to perform other high-level medical tasks.
She used to be a drunk and a drug addict.
By the time she was 8, she was playing football with the boys in the neighborhood. Draper was as strong and fast as any of them. But at 12, she started smoking pot and at 14, alcohol joined the freefall. Her mother, who died in 1991, was shocked by her daughter’s choices. All of them.
“When I had my first relationship with another woman, my mom threw me out of the house,” she said.
A bad life on some bad streets lasted into her early 20s. Then she joined the Army and began lifting ridiculous amounts of weight in the gym. Her strength earned her a shot at the Army fire department. She ended up at Fort Carson, south of Colorado Springs, and made the jump to the city fire department nine years ago.
“Juliet has always been exactly what you see,” said city Fire Chief Manny Navarro. “She’s full of life and full of expectation about what’s around the corner. And she’s also an extremely talented singer.”
Singing, though, doesn’t impress other firefighters.
But saving their lives gets their attention.
“We had a Westside fire in 2002, and we had guys trapped on the roof. It was bad,” Navarro said. “And here comes Juliet whipping a ladder up there and getting everyone off the roof. She’s got the respect of everyone.”
Today, she and 15-year partner Pam Jones also volunteer with Urban Peak, a group for teens whose lives have skidded out of control. Draper also visits the Zebulon Pike Juvenile Detention Center in El Paso County. She brings a heavy message.
“The kids respond to me because I’m tough. They want to see the abs, the six-pack. ‘How much you bench?’ That kind of stuff,” Draper said. “I give them hope. I let them know where I came from and that juvenile detention doesn’t mean it’s over.”
Draper, who smiles a lot, saves the biggest grin for a story about a recent chat she had at the detention center with a gang member.
“I tell him the truth, that I used to be a gang-banger just like him,” she said. “So he asks, ‘You still representing?’ and I told him, yeah, I represent the Colorado Springs Fire Department. I told him I’ve got more than 400 people in my posse. Good men and good women. And in my posse, we get paid.
“Most drug dealers, they still live with their mommas.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
