Given a Riemannian manifold and a closed submanifold, we find a geodesic segment with free boundary on the given submanifold. This is a corollary of the min–max theory which we develop in this article for the free boundary variational problem. In particular, we develop a modified Birkhoff curve shortening process to achieve a strong “Colding–Minicozzi” type min–max approximation result.