The First Mile Always Sucks. Let It Go.

It’s not just you. The first mile of a run (or about the first ten minutes of any exercise) sucks for everybody. Go easy on yourself in that first mile, though, and you can set yourself up for a great workout or race.

We ask too much of ourselves, sometimes.

You head out for a three mile run, and you want to be able to say afterward that you ran three miles in a certain time—let’s say 30 minutes. So you step out of your car, or out your front door, and try to immediately keep up a 10-minute-mile pace.

It sucks, right? You hate your life. You wonder why you ever took up running in the first place. You either slow down, or manage to keep up the pace and endure the suffering. Clearly I can’t run 10-minute miles, you say to yourself. I thought I could, but I haven’t been training enough. I shouldn’t have eaten that pizza. I’ll always be slow. It’s only been five minutes and I feel like I’m going to die. I might as well pack up and go home.

Hands up if you’ve ever had a workout feel so terrible in the first ten minutes that you’ve abandoned your plan for the day, or worse yet, actually just gone home. Yeah, me too.

Here are the eight words that are going to change your life: The first mile is junk. Throw it away.

You should never expect anything good from your first mile. It will either be slow, or feel awful, or both. But during that first mile, your muscles are transitioning to a more efficient way of working. The slow, stiff, cold, doubtful first mile paves the way for the smooth, easy, strong miles to follow.

As you begin to exercise, your breathing speeds up, to get more oxygen into your blood. Your heart beats faster and your blood vessels dilate, to get that oxygen-rich blood to your muscles as quickly as possible. And your muscles temporarily make more of the enzymes that turn fuel into energy. Triggering these changes before your workout primes your body to work efficiently, according to Runner’s World, even if you take a break between your warmup and your real workout.

Measure that first mile, but don’t worry about your pace:

How to Use Your First Mile as a Warmup

Let’s put this in terms of training goals. The first mile of your run has one job and one job only: To prepare your body for the rest of the workout, which is where the magic happens. So rather than thinking of your training run as a three-miler, you’re running a one-mile warmup and a two-mile workout. And you won’t start looking at your watch, or asking yourself to do anything strenuous, until that first mile is behind you.

The first mile will take more time for some people than for others, so just to be clear: we’re talking about the first 10 minutes or so of your workout. If you’re super speedy, you might want to think of this warmup time as your first two miles. Or if you prefer to think in time rather than distance, set your watch for 10 or even 15 minutes.

So, no timing yourself on the first mile. Don’t try to run a particular speed, or to tackle hills or fast intervals. Just work at an easy pace. That may mean an easy jog or, if you haven’t figured out how to run slow, a heart-pumping brisk walk. To fully prime those oxygen-delivery systems, include some mini-intervals, which runners call strides: accelerate to a sprint, hold that speed for 10 seconds or so, then slow back down. Jog for a minute to recover. Work a few of these into the last few minutes of your warmup.

Yes, I know there are unpleasant consequences: the slower mile will pull down the pace-per-mile that your Garmin is tracking. Or you can start timing after the first mile is over, but then your app won’t give you credit for that first mile. Here’s how much you should care about that: zero. Just because an app gives you numbers to track, doesn’t mean chasing those numbers will help your fitness. A log on paper is my solution to that problem: I write down that I ran three miles, and then add a note about what my pace was for the two miles that really count.

It’s amazing how good it feels to go easy on yourself during the first mile. Try it once or twice, and you’ll be hooked. Problem solved. But then what do you do when it’s time to run a race?

Trashing the First Mile on Race Day

You don’t want that junk mile messing up your race time, so you’ll need to get to the race early, and actually warm up. If you’ve always shown up to races a few minutes before the starting gun and tried to hit your goal pace right off the bat, this will take some getting used to. I promise it’s worth it.

One caveat: In a very long race like a marathon, it may be impossible to warm up beforehand, and that’s actually kind of okay. You’ll probably be huddling in a crowded start corral for a half hour or more before the race starts. You can do some squats while you wait, to help your muscles get ready to work, but the first mile of the race will be your real warmup. Take it easy. Even if you’re a minute or two over goal pace, you’ll be able to make it up later in the race because you’ll be feeling so great. (That said, marathon racing strategy is a whole field of study unto itself.)

The shorter the race, the more important the warmup. I once ran a two-kilometer race (1.2 miles) and my warmup was longer than the race itself. I jogged around the side streets near the race’s start, and once I was feeling good, I ran a few strides, with a minute or two recovery, before moseying over to the starting line. The warmup was 1.5 miles and worth every inch.

To allow yourself time and space for your pre-race first mile, scope out the area ahead of time, and get there early. Run the same warmup you ran in training. That might be an easy mile, or an easy ten minutes, or ten minutes easy plus five minutes of strides to prime your muscles for the challenge to come. There’s a benefit beyond the physical: doing a familiar warmup before a race can help to calm your nerves.

With that first mile out of the way, you can turn in a great performance without feeling like you’re going to die. Races are hard enough with good preparation; trying to run a 5K without a warmup is just making it harder on yourself. Throw away that first mile, on race days or training days, and what remains will be your best effort.

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