How ‘Warming Up’ Helps Me Delay Gratification

On every single run I’ve been on lately, the first mile has felt terrible. Sometimes, the first three to four miles all feel terrible. On the first mile, I sometimes run an average pace two minutes slower than my average pace the rest of the run. I don’t know what it is about the first mile, but gone are the days where I can get out the door and run my fastest mile. This has been a confounding phenomenon given I’m a seasoned marathon runner who ran a 2:35 (5:56 mile pace) just three weeks ago.

But I have started to internalize that how I feel on the first mile of a run is not at all going to be indicative of how I feel on the rest of the run (although on rare days, it is). This is of course evidenced by the first mile of many runs being a struggle to run faster than nine minutes, followed by the last mile of my run being faster than six minutes, with the last mile feeling significantly easier than the first. By mile five to six, I am usually in the “zone,” the part of the run that feels amazing and reminds me of why I started running in the first place.

Physiologically, this makes sense. The first mile is a warm up into the rest of the run. According to the American Heart Association, a warm up widens the blood vessels and ensures that muscles are well-supplied with oxygen. The warm up also raises muscle temperature for the best flexibility and efficiency and minimizes stress on the heart. In short, the warm up, coupled with stretching, helps gradually ease into the workout. For me, this is especially true when it’s cold.

Recently, on my workouts, I have made a big adjustment. I used to warm up only one mile prior to starting the workout. And because of that, I would feel extremely sluggish any time I tried to ease into a workout of, say, seven mile repeats. I recently have increased the length of my warm up to at least two miles before I start doing any intense workouts, which has allowed me to feel significantly better when starting the workout. I may still feel sluggish, but I won’t feel as sluggish as I used to, and I will realize that how I feel at the very beginning of the workout is not as indicative of how I feel at the end. The more mileage I’m running and the harder I’m going in the training cycle, the more pronounced this phenomenon is.

By the third or fourth rep or set, I might start feeling amazing. By the last one, I feel unstoppable. It is much better than I have ever felt with just a one-mile warm up, and it’s a lesson I wish I learned earlier instead of just trying to save time and not warm up much at all. It becomes quite jarring how difficult running a 10-minute mile felt on the first mile of the warm up, followed by how easy a 5:20 mile will feel seven miles into an interval workout, but it’s just another lesson that the first mile of feeling like trash is not only not how I’ll feel later on, but it is a necessary part of the process for a successful workout later.

But the concept of warming up, for me, isn’t just integral to running or working out. It takes me a while to warm up into the “zone” while I am studying or when I am writing. It takes me five minutes of just sitting around and being completely unproductive before I can be productive in a given task. Warming up is a means of increasing my concentration, but it has more important utility than that. It teaches me that sometimes, I need to delay gratification. I expect instant results and feeling great and in “the zone” right away when that isn’t the case. Like running, any session I put into studying for my law school exams or writing 50-page papers usually has a slow start.

Sometimes, I never break into the “zone” and the whole session feels like an unproductive slog where I spend 30 minutes learning nothing and just staring at my computer screen. However, I have learned that does not make that session useless. Many times, my first exposure to new, dense, and highly technical material feels that way — like I have no idea what’s going on. However, my second and then third exposure to the same material will feel like everything clicked as a result. It’s why the best thing I can do on exams is to read a prompt or hypothetical several times, and then read it again when I go back over and check my answers.

Learning to delay gratification in this indirect manner doesn’t only happen over the course of a run or over two days of studying. It’s something that has happened over the course of years. Most recently, it took me three years to break out of a huge slump and plateau in the marathon. When I finally did, it felt like I broke free from an incredible amount of self-doubt that held me back as a runner, but it was a process that took a long time in regaining my confidence.

Delayed gratification is a means of prioritizing a long-term goal over instant rewards. The biggest example in my life of delayed gratification spanning years or even decades is in my confidence. I spent most of my life being a very unconfident person, not only academically, professionally, or athletically, but socially. Since middle school, I had social anxiety and often feared that people would judge me or that I would make a fool out of myself. When I was an elementary-aged kid, I lived freely and did not care at all what others thought of me, so it was a complete 180 that came with a lot of life transitions as well as puberty, probably. I never necessarily shook this, because it would just take a while getting to know new people and leaving my comfort zone socially. I would be known in middle and high school as someone who was very quiet and wouldn’t necessarily speak up in a group of a lot of people, but who would demonstrate significant kindness and integrity when I did get to know people.

I simply was not a very confident person in my sense of self and tried too hard to fit in. Looking back at that period of time, more than a decade later, however, there were various benefits to that existential crisis and hardship. First, I became a much better person. As agonizing as it was to feel like I wouldn’t be accepted and that all eyes were on me, it made me realize that other people could feel that way all the time due to various kinds of marginalization due to race, religion, or sexuality, and ultimately my faith and my politics became especially informed by this period of my life.

I started to have a very keen eye for when people were not comfortable or had a hard time breaking out of their shell because that was how I felt most of the time. I particularly started to gravitate towards other shy people because, I realized, people sometimes are not shy by default, but do have that lack of comfort in a new space. I also realized there is a big difference between quiet and shy — quiet people don’t have a lot to say by default, whereas shy people may have a lot to say but won’t feel comfortable saying it. I fit the latter, but even if people were on the quieter side, I learned that a lot of people I spent a lot of time with appreciated someone’s effort in reaching out and caring.

Regardless, today, I am a much more confident person in terms of reading the room and making sure everyone feels listened to. I learned in my early 20s how much value there is in knowing everyone’s name in the workplace, saying hello when you see them, and making sure they’re treated with a sense of kindness and respect, for example. And it’s not like I don’t think I’m ever wrong for how I handled a situation or don’t ever have uncertainty, but that I am much more assured in who I am as a person and what I bring in trying to enrich other people’s lives.

Socially, academically, professionally, and athletically, “the zone” is not necessarily a space I have been in all the time. Sometimes, I will have incredible breakthroughs in one area of my life, only to feel like I relapsed into another cycle of a rut or stagnancy a week later. That, for most people, is just life, but knowing delayed gratification and how long it can take for something to pay off, if it ever pays off, has helped me stay the course and be more patient when things don’t “click” for me right away.

I have the recognition that there are thousands of versions of the first mile of the run, the part of the task or process that is sluggish, painful, and where you wonder whether you have completely lost your mojo. That “first mile” applies in every area of my life, since I seem to not be the kind of person who always starts strong or has super smooth beginnings of journeys.

Of course, not every life event or activity is a run. I have certainly had plenty of life events that finished worse than they started. As a special education teacher, there is a term in teaching known as the “honeymoon phase,” which is obviously a reference to the early and exciting period of a relationship where couples first get to know each other. In teaching, the honeymoon phase is when students start out very strong, are engaged, and behave very well, and usually lasts about two to four weeks before the daily grind and more off-task behaviors happen. There is a lot of power in a really good first impression before settling into a routine.

At the same time, although there is a honeymoon phase, a lot of teachers will still have a very tough first year or couple of years of teaching, followed by getting the hang of it by their third or fourth year, and anticipating challenges before they happen. I know this happened for me, as I developed a lot of strategies to stop problems before they happened and called parents frequently to keep them informed.

But I like to think of my first year of teaching like the first mile of every run. It wasn’t great, but every year after that got significantly better and I felt more in rhythm and had a lot more momentum with each one. Without the strategies I learned and the toughness I gained my first year, I would have never survived and then thrived in my third.

I am a very goal-oriented person, but I have long been the type of person whose results don’t differ much from how something feels. Most of the time, if I feel like I did well on an exam, I usually do well on the exam. If I feel like I did well on a paper, I usually do well on the paper. Again, much of this is still a process, where there are lots of phases and sessions where it feels like it’s not going well before everything finally clicks.

Delayed gratification has always been very difficult for me, and it’s no surprise I’ve gotten much better at it the older I’ve gotten. Being able to delay gratification is a skill that gets better naturally with age.

The fact is, long-term, I now realize, more than ever, that right now may not be the time, that today may not be the day when my effort pays off. But I still work hard and toil with the hope and dream that this is just the first mile, and down the road, I might get into the zone.

All it might take is a warm up.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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