As a veteran with the Chicago Fire Department, it’s Chrissy Sarnowsky’s job to be prepared for anything during a crisis. Still, the 55-year-old says nothing could have prepared her for competing on the 48th edition of “Survivor,” debuting on CBS and Paramount+ on Feb. 26.
“The challenges were a lot harder than I thought they’d be, a lot harder,” said the Mount Greenwood resident, the sole competitor from the Midwest this season. “But I did learn you can go a long time without eating. I definitely overeat,” she joked.
Last year, Sarnowsky left her day job as a fire lieutenant with the Chicago Fire Prevention Bureau to travel to the islands of Fiji with 17 other strangers to test her survival skills, all in the pursuit of becoming the last one standing to take home the $1 million grand prize.
“I think being a firefighter in the department for 26 years and a paramedic for 33 years, my life experience was a good fit. Plus my age, they have to cast the ‘older person,’” Sarnowsky shared, admitting she was apprehensive at first about how her colleagues would react. “I was a little nervous about the firemen giving me a little razzmatazz about it, but they’ve been nothing but supportive.”
As a lifelong watcher of the Emmy Award-winning series since its advent in 2000, Sarnowsky said she was compelled to try out for the show during a commercial break while watching a previous season’s episodes.
“I was at home watching an episode I had recorded and then I see Jeff Probst on this beautiful beach, and he had his arms open and was like, ‘If you want to be on here, apply!’” Sarnowsky recalled. “I was in my pajamas and grabbed my phone and googled the application and filled it out. That was before I realized I had to submit a video, too. … It was probably the worst application you can get,” Sarnowsky joked. “But the next day I got an email … and it just evolved from there.”
If you spend 10 minutes talking with the South Sider, who spent a large part of her career in the Englewood community, you can sense what “Survivor” producers saw in her. She has a charming wit, do-anything spirit and an affable sense of humor, as seen in the casting video in which Sarnowsky joked, “I’m really good at putting out fires; I’m not sure I could start one.” When asked if she was successful in that mission, Sarnowsky coyly said, “You’ll have to watch the show and see. … But I didn’t practice, and I look back now and I’m like, why didn’t you?”
Sarnowsky works full time and is a single parent to a 17-year-old son. “It was great that I got picked for the show, I didn’t stop my life and go all ‘Survivor’ mode,” she said. “I was just hoping my skills in general would work their way through.”
The first responder did add in one key training component — swimming. Three to five times a week, Sarnowsky used the lap pool in her gym to get better equipped with navigating water.
“The only time I ever swam was when we went to the beach and I dunked my head in the water to get cooled off. I never really used swimming as a form of getting around,” she shared, adding, “The first couple times I was swimming at the gym, I asked my boyfriend, how do I look? And he said, ‘You look like you’re trying not to drown.’ So I kept at it so I’d be comfortable when those challenges came around.”
That hyper-focus became one of her strengths, she said. In fact, when asked what she brought with her from home to the island, Sarnowsky divulged, “I didn’t bring anything. Some people had pictures of their loved ones, and I didn’t even bring a picture of my son! But it was good. It got me in the game. You don’t want any distractions.”
While Sarnowsky naturally can’t share much about what happens over the course of the new season, she does have a plan for how she will use the $1 million if she ends up the victor.
“I want to help my mom out. She’s on Social Security now and is barely making it through. And my son, too, as he’s getting ready to possibly go to college,” she shared.
There’s also a group of friends that she wants to support in their own real-life survivor battles.
“I have this big group of girlfriends — we’ve been friends since grammar school — and a couple of them are fighting cancer right now. To help them financially would be awesome so they don’t have to worry about that part of their fight.”