I know we can execute Runnables in an ExecutorService which will be executed as separate threads. But I recently came across a situation where I need to know the state of a Thread during its executions. For that I created instances of Threads (instead of Runnable) and submitted it to an ExecutorService. However, the Thread state remained in NEW state. Syntactically the program had no errors but I feel I am missing something. Here is the sample program:

public class ThreadStates3 {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException {
        Thread thread = new Thread(getRunnable());
        Thread thread2 = new Thread(getRunnable());

        ExecutorService service = Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor();
        service.execute(thread);
        service.execute(thread2);

        while (true) {
            System.out.println("Thread 1: " + thread.getState() + ", Thread 2: " + thread2.getState());
            Thread.sleep(1000);
            boolean taskComplete = thread.getState() == Thread.State.TERMINATED &&
                    thread2.getState() == Thread.State.TERMINATED;
            if (taskComplete) break;
        }

        System.out.println("Program complete.");
    }

    static Runnable getRunnable() {
        return () -> {
            try {
                Thread.sleep(2000);
            } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                throw new RuntimeException(e);
            }
        };
    }
}