How a Firefighter Quit Smoking With Chantix and Running

I’m Stephen Hayes. I’m forty-two years old, I’m a firefighter in Columbus, Ohio, and I smoked for nineteen years while telling people that fires were the dangerous part of my job. Turns out the thing that nearly took me down wasn’t a burning building. It was a pack of Camel Blues.

I started at twenty-three, fresh out of the fire academy. My first station was Firehouse 19 on the east side. The culture at that firehouse in 2007 was straightforward: you ate together, you worked out together, and half the guys smoked together. The older firefighters all smoked. The lieutenant smoked. Standing around after a call, still wearing your turnout pants, sharing a cigarette while the adrenaline came down, that was part of the brotherhood. Nobody told me to start. But nobody told me not to, either.

I smoked Camel Lights, which became Camel Blues when they rebranded. About a pack a day. More on shift days, because those twenty-four-hour shifts have a lot of downtime between calls, and downtime is when smoking thrives. You’re sitting in the bay, or you’re out back by the dumpster, or you’re on the apron watching traffic, and you’ve got a cigarette going. It fills the waiting. And firefighting is ninety percent waiting.

The ironic thing is, I was in great shape. I worked out every shift day in the firehouse gym. I could throw a thirty-five-foot ground ladder by myself. I could drag a two-hundred-pound dummy down a hallway wearing full gear and an air pack. I passed every physical fitness test the department threw at me. My body was performing well enough that I could pretend the smoking wasn’t doing anything.

But I noticed things. Climbing stairs in a high-rise with my air pack on, I’d burn through my bottle faster than the non-smokers. At the top of a six-story walkup, they’d have a quarter tank left and I’d be sucking fumes. I’d get a lingering cough after fire calls that the other guys would shake off in a day. My resting heart rate was higher than it should’ve been for someone who exercises regularly.

I tried to quit four times.

First time was 2014. Cold turkey. I was twenty-nine and I figured willpower should be enough. I’m a guy who runs into burning buildings. I should be able to stop smoking. I lasted five days. Five days of being so cranky that the guys on my shift told the captain they didn’t want to ride with me. On a fire truck, you need to trust the person next to you. You can’t have them ready to bite someone’s head off because they haven’t had a cigarette. I went back to smoking.

Second time was 2016. I tried the patch, Nicoderm CQ. It managed the nicotine cravings decently, but I had brutal insomnia. I’d lie in my bunk at the firehouse wide awake at 2 AM, staring at the ceiling, wired. Sleep is sacred in a firehouse. You never know when the tones are going to drop and you’ll need to be alert. After twelve days of barely sleeping, I quit quitting.

Third time was 2019. I tried nicotine lozenges. They worked okay during the day, but every time I’d go on a call, the adrenaline and stress would override whatever the lozenge was doing. I’d get back from a fire and the craving would be so intense it felt physical, like a hand reaching into my chest. I lasted three weeks that time, which was my best run.

Fourth time was 2021. Cold turkey again, because I’m stubborn and figured I’d just gut through it harder this time. Nine days. Same result. The job stress was too much. After a particularly bad call involving a car accident with kids, I bought a pack on the way home and smoked half of it sitting in my driveway.

After that, I accepted being a smoking firefighter. I know how absurd that is. I’m literally trained in hazardous materials awareness, I know what combustion byproducts do to human tissue, and I’m voluntarily inhaling them on purpose twenty times a day. The cognitive dissonance was something I just learned to live with.

The turning point came in early 2025. Our department started doing annual cancer screenings for all firefighters. Occupational cancer is a massive issue in the fire service. We’re exposed to carcinogens every time we fight a fire. The department brought in a mobile screening unit and I went through the full battery: bloodwork, chest X-ray, lung function test, the works.

My chest X-ray came back clean. No cancer. But my pulmonary function test was below where it should be for a forty-one-year-old male who exercises regularly. The department physician, Dr. Wheeler, sat me down and said, “Steve, your lungs are aging faster than you are. If you keep smoking and keep getting fire exposure on top of it, you’re looking at COPD before you’re sixty.”

That hit different. I wasn’t afraid of dying in a fire. Every firefighter makes some kind of peace with that possibility. But dying slowly, wheezing, unable to walk across a room, hooked up to an oxygen tank, that scared me. My grandfather died of emphysema. I watched him shrink from a big, loud Italian man to a skeleton in a recliner who couldn’t finish a sentence without stopping to breathe. I was not going to let that be me.

I asked Dr. Wheeler what he recommended. He said Chantix (varenicline) combined with exercise. Not just my normal workout routine, but specifically cardiovascular exercise. Running. The Chantix would handle the neurochemical side of the addiction by blocking the nicotine receptors in my brain. The running would give me a natural dopamine replacement, improve my lung function, and serve as tangible proof that I was getting healthier.

I started Chantix in February 2025. The standard protocol: 0.5mg once daily for the first three days, then 0.5mg twice daily for days four through seven, then 1mg twice daily from day eight onward. My quit date was day eight, February 15.

The first week on Chantix, before my quit date, I was still smoking but I noticed the cigarettes tasting wrong. Not bad exactly, but off. Like the volume had been turned down on the satisfaction. By day five I was smoking maybe six cigarettes instead of my usual twenty, not because I was trying to cut back, but because I just didn’t want them as much. That was a new feeling.

February 15, I smoked my last cigarette at 10 PM the night before and woke up as a non-smoker. The first day was strange. I kept waiting for the cravings to hit the way they had during my cold turkey attempts. They didn’t. I felt a pull, a whisper of wanting, but it wasn’t the screaming demand I was used to. The Chantix was doing its job. My brain was reaching for the nicotine receptor and finding the door already occupied.

I started running on day three. Nothing big. A mile and a half around the neighborhood. My lungs burned and my pace was embarrassing. I was a guy who could hump a charged hoseline up three flights of stairs, and I was winded running a mile and a half at a ten-minute pace. But Dr. Wheeler had warned me about that. He said the first few weeks of running would be humbling. He was right.

The hardest moment came on day eleven. I was on shift and we caught a working fire at a warehouse on the west side. Two alarms. I was on the nozzle for the initial attack, doing the thing I’d trained my whole career to do. We knocked the fire down in about forty minutes. Afterward, in the parking lot, doing overhaul and repacking hose, three of the guys from the engine company lit up. That post-fire cigarette is like nothing else. The adrenaline dump, the exhaustion, the relief that nobody got hurt, and then the cigarette that brings you back down to earth. I’d had a thousand of those cigarettes.

I wanted one. The Chantix had reduced the physical craving, but the psychological pull was enormous. This was my ritual. My reward. The thing that marked the transition from firefighter back to normal human being. I stood there with my hands in my pockets, watching the smoke curl up from their cigarettes against the floodlights, and I felt a loneliness I hadn’t expected. Like I was leaving a club I’d belonged to for nineteen years.

I went to the truck and drank a bottle of water instead. It wasn’t the same. It wasn’t anywhere close to the same. But I didn’t smoke.

I stayed on Chantix for twelve weeks, the full recommended course. The side effects were manageable. Some nausea for the first two weeks, which I dealt with by always taking the pill with food. Vivid dreams, which were weird but not disturbing. Occasional headaches that ibuprofen handled.

The running progressed faster than I expected. By week four, I was doing three miles. By week eight, five miles. My lungs were opening up. I could feel it. Each week I could breathe a little deeper, run a little farther, recover a little faster. It was like someone was slowly turning up the oxygen in the room.

By the time I tapered off Chantix at the twelve-week mark, I was running five days a week and had signed up for a half marathon. The cravings when I stopped the medication were mild. Not zero, but nothing like my cold turkey attempts. The combination of three months of Chantix rewiring my brain and three months of running rewiring my reward system had fundamentally changed something.

I ran the Columbus Half Marathon in October 2025. Finished in 1:58:22. Under two hours. Not elite by any means, but for a guy who could barely run a mile eight months earlier, it felt like an Olympic gold medal. My kids were at the finish line. My captain from the firehouse came. Gina was there holding a sign that said “Smoke-Free Steve.” I wasn’t embarrassed. I was proud.

It’s been about thirteen months since I quit. Here’s what’s different.

My pulmonary function test improved. I went back to Dr. Wheeler six months after quitting, and my numbers had moved in the right direction. He said my lungs were recovering. Not fully, because nineteen years of damage doesn’t disappear, but recovering. He used the word “remarkable” and Dr. Wheeler is not a man who uses that word casually.

I go through my air bottle slower on fire calls. I used to be the first one out of air on the fireground. Now I’m lasting as long as the non-smokers. That’s not just a health thing. That’s a safety thing. More air means more time. More time means I can do my job better and get out safer.

I’ve saved about $3,600. Camel Blues in Columbus run about $8.50 a pack. I bought a nice GPS running watch with some of that money, a Garmin Forerunner 265. I look at it every day.

The guys at the firehouse noticed. Two of them have asked me how I quit. One of them, Martinez, started Chantix last month. I check in on him every shift. I don’t preach. I just ask how he’s doing. That’s what I needed when I was going through it, someone who understood and didn’t lecture.

If you’re still smoking, here’s what I want to tell you, and I’m going to be direct because that’s how we talk in a firehouse.

You’re not too tough to need help. I thought I was tough enough to quit cold turkey four times, and four times I proved myself wrong. There’s no shame in using Chantix or patches or gum or whatever tool gets you there. You wouldn’t fight a fire without the right equipment. Don’t fight nicotine addiction without it either.

Find something to replace the reward. For me it was running. For you it might be lifting, or swimming, or cycling, or walking. Doesn’t matter what it is. What matters is that your brain needs a new source of the feel-good chemicals that cigarettes used to provide.

And expect to feel lonely. If your social circle smokes, quitting means stepping outside that circle for a while. It doesn’t mean losing your friends. It means the relationship changes shape. That’s okay. It’s worth it.

You are not alone. Every first responder who smokes after a bad call, every person who thinks they’re too fit for cigarettes to hurt them, every person who’s tried and failed and thinks they’re not strong enough. You are not alone. And you are strong enough. You just need the right tools.