I wouldn’t exactly say I’m someone who needs a fitness challenge to make sense before I agree to try it.
In fact, the more a workout sounds like something designed to make people quit, the more likely I am to at least wonder whether I could get through it. I love volunteering myself as tribute for these kinds of things, especially if it means I can prove to myself that I’m fully capable when the assumption is that a finish is completely out of reach.
Running has already done that for me. I was never much of an athlete growing up, so building endurance, speed, and enough confidence to race marathons has been one of the more surprising arcs of my adult life. The difference is that races usually end with a medal. The Impossible Mile ends with a lot of sweat and regret (and for a lot of content creators, a video to post and gain some followers).
The viral fitness challenge breaks one mile into four laps around a track:
- 400 meters of burpee broad jumps
- 400 meters of walking lunges
- 400 meters of bear crawls
- 400 meters of running
I’d seen very fit people on social media finish in under an hour. One guy I watched did it in 55:54, while another woman finished in 59 minutes. I had no real time goal, mostly because I wasn’t exactly setting myself up for peak performance.
It was an 80-something-degree, cloudless morning in New York City. I had decided it was a boxed wine kind of evening at the Abrams residence the night before, so I was nursing a mild hangover. I decided to jog 6.5 miles from the Upper East Side to Riverbank State Park in Hamilton Heights as a warmup, because apparently I thought the challenge itself wasn’t enough.
My friend Ben came with me to document the attempt and serve as moral support, which I knew would mean giggling as I tried to make the whole thing feel as unserious as possible.
Lap 1: burpee broad jumps
I kicked things off with the burpee broad jumps as I figured they’d end up being the worst of the four obstacles. I decided to sport some black Burton gloves, typically meant for winter sports, because the track was already scalding and because I wanted a buffer from the rough surface. I made an attempt to tally up each burpee in my head, but lost count of the reps pretty quickly on account of the delirium from the heat. Still, I was very aware before I even started that 400 meters of burpee broad jumps meant I’d be doing an unhealthy number of burpee broad jumps. My lap took 26:12.
I should’ve known that things would get gross real fast. My Brooks tank was soaked to the point of suction, my sunglasses fogged and started slipping off my face, and my AirPods, which I thought would be useful for some pump-up music, never stood a chance in my ears with the intensity of my movements. I’d been doing full burpees, but carefully, which probably slowed me down and also probably saved me from acting like a total maniac in the first lap.
Lap 2: lunges
The lunges came next, and those were the closest thing I had to a comfort zone. Lower body days at the gym are my favorite. I tried to get my back knee down as much as possible while Ben kept me honest, but the elements were really coming for me hard. The sun was getting stronger, not wearing sunscreen was certainly a choice, and by then I was so sweaty that applying any probably would’ve just turned me into a greasy Slip ’N Slide anyway.
The lunge lap took 17:09. For a moment, I felt almost competent. Impossible, what?
Lap 3: bear crawls
Then came the bear crawls. Those ridiculous bear crawls.
The gloves helped, but barely. I could feel the heat and texture of the track through my palms, and I took plenty of breaks. Ben kept yelling at me to move faster in short bursts, so the lap became more of a cycle of crawl, push for speed, slow it back down, complain a whole lot, and repeat.
That one took 21:58.
Lap 4: running
By the time I got to the final 400-meter run, I wasn’t trying to go full-on sprint, but I did want to at least finish strong enough that it still looked like running. I managed the lap in 3:02, hands in the air with that cheesy ear-to-ear grin, bringing my total time to 1:08:21.
The bottom line
The Impossible Mile is boring on paper and brutal in practice, which I found to be such a strange combination. A track loop already feels mentally cruel to me (I notoriously hate an out-and-back or any kind of run that feels like you’re going nowhere). Add burpees, lunges, bear crawls, and super high temperatures, and it becomes much less of a workout and more of a life choice worth contemplating: How badly do you want to finish something stupid just because you started it?
Apparently, for me at least, pretty badly.
Would I recommend doing it after a night out and a 6.5-mile warmup? No. Would I do it again? Also no, at least not without a better reason than “I saw it online.”
There was no medal waiting for me at the end, but I didn’t pay a triple-digit entry fee. I did, however, get some celebratory beers afterward. That counts for something.
Sean Abrams was the Senior Editor, Growth and Engagement at Men’s Health. He’s a former hip hop dancer who likes long walks on the beach and large glasses of tequila. You can find his previous work at Maxim, Elite Daily, and AskMen.