Keep Your Resolutions
Sometimes it’s easier to take the hard way.
The New Year is exciting: a clean slate with fresh goals, hope, possibility. We proclaim our resolutions, maintaining that, “Nope, it’ll be different this year.”
But like that new-car smell, the initial excitement fades and motivation wanes. When it comes to New Year’s resolutions, according to Better Help, only 36% of people make it past the first month, and fewer than 9% successfully keep their resolutions for the full year. For many, the idea of meeting that goal is dwarfed by the steps it takes to achieve it. Indeed, the unsexy daily grind isn’t worth the squeeze.
At least that’s the story they tell themselves.
But what if I told you that because sticking to a goal is hard, it makes it more worth it in the end? Moreover, by not sticking to a goal, by quitting, you may be making things harder for yourself.
Endurance coach Chris Hauth talks about the importance of keeping the promise you make to yourself on his Endurance Mindset podcast – especially because we are usually our own worst critics. In recounting a talk he gave before a recent 29029 event, where participants repeatedly climb a mountain until they’ve accumulated enough elevation gain to have summited Everest, or 29029 feet, Hauth spoke about building mental fortitude versus the consequences of quitting.
“Quitting. Quitting is immediate. So, stay in it. Don’t give yourself that excuse, that out.” - Chris Hauth
“You need to go through the moments in order to build that resilience,” Hauth says. “It takes a long time to build resilience. Each ascent up the mountain, you continue to prove to yourself that you can when you didn’t want to, that you can take that next step.
“You know what goes really quickly?” Hauth continues. “Quitting. Quitting is immediate. So, stay in it. Don’t give yourself that excuse, that out.”
Even though Hauth was talking about a singular event, that approach holds true for long-term goals. “Resilience is built slowly. Keep staying in your day,” Hauth says. “Because guess what? The sun will rise tomorrow. And what you then have is the other part of inner judgment: regret. Why do you have regret? Because it’s important to you. Why was it important to you? Because you gave your word to yourself. You said you were going to do this. Regret and integrity have a very close relationship.”
That last line that connects regret and integrity really resonates. More on that in a minute.
Discipline > Motivation
Twenty twenty-five marked my tenth year running on Strava. Across this past decade, I’ve run 22,531 miles, which works out to running 2,253 miles per year, or 6.17 miles per day. Compared to many runners – especially the elites – running nearly a 10k per day for a decade is not impressive. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that. However, I offer these stats for context.
These days, running just happens for me. But it wasn’t always that way. I was motivated to start, but it took commitment to keep going. I remember training for my first marathon in 2003. During that 18-week block, I had to drag myself out the door to run 5 days a week. I changed my diet. Partied less. Slept more. It took a full lifestyle change just to get to the starting line. In fact, it was such a shock to my system that after I crossed the finish in 3:29, I swore off endurance running.
But still, the lesson I learned was this: for how hard and annoying those weeks were, for how many times I would’ve rather have gone to the bar or stayed up until 2am (keep in mind I was in my mid-20s), I could achieve a goal if I stuck to it. In that instance, the juice was worth the squeeze.
And that holds true for all of us.
In my late 30s, when I rehashed my love for running, I kept that first marathon experience in mind. And once I decided to run my second marathon – Revel Canyon City in 2015 – I was all in. Because I had a bigger goal, which was qualify for Boston. That mindset led to a passion that snowballed into more marathons, including Boston, and, soon thereafter, trail running and ultras (hello, getting to experience suffering, another goal).
In fact, that passion has taken over so much that, for better or worse, I’ve made running the focus of my free time for the better part of 10 years. Running is always in the back of my mind, and it seems every choice I make has something to do with how it will impact tomorrow’s run, or the session next week, or the race two months out. For example, I go to bed by 9:30 and wake up at 4:00. To sleep more soundly, I hydrate throughout the day and don’t drink caffeine late in the afternoon. In my experience, it’s those daily micro decisions that help me achieve my larger goal. Otherwise, I might just languish in regret.
Listen to your Self-Talk
A significant element to achieving our goals – or sticking to our resolutions – is the conversation we have with ourselves. That is especially true when we sign up for a race or plant a stake in the ground and strive toward a major goal. It is in these moments that we get to truly walk the talk, says Hauth. Because we runners are always having a conversation with ourselves.
“When I give my word to myself on something,” Hauth says, “and I’ve committed to it long term, it’s up to me to follow through. I don’t break my word to myself, because lying to yourself is only a dark path.
“Integrity begins with being honest with yourself,” Hauth continues. “And honest with yourself is with your mind. It’s always watching you. It’s always paying attention. And if you break your word to yourself, you’re never going to get there, whatever there is. It’s a constant theme through our lives. You start rationalizing [why you’re not going to follow through]? Integrity gone.
“And not being honest with yourself, not keeping your word to yourself, you’ll always know,” reminds Hauth. “And then the self-sabotage really starts. Because if you don’t take yourself seriously, you won’t start the thing. Because if your mind is already saying, I’ve said that many times before, but do I take action? No. Do I follow through? No. Am I capable of this? No. What are the reps? The reps are in not being true to yourself, not keeping your word. And then the resistance of keeping your word becomes greater because now you’re fighting your mind and your body. So, hold yourself accountable. Judge yourself.”
Accountability Mirror
As we rounded the final turn of 2025, I looked at my total mileage for the year, and I was dangerously close to hitting a total of 2,000 miles for the year, an arbitrary milestone I’ve hit each year since 2017.
Considering the life events that stack up during the Holidays, not to mention the three months this summer when I couldn’t run due to a bone-stress injury and tibial edema, it would’ve been forgivable just to phone in the rest of the year and turn to 2026. After all, who’s keeping score? But when I woke up on Monday, December 29, with 1,966 miles logged for the year, I thought about my arbitrary streak and how I would feel if I didn’t at least try to meet that mark.
My mind took me back to Hauth’s podcast, where he was talking about the consequences of “soft quitting,” which is when ultrarunners who have been chasing cutoffs all day strategically slow down even more so that they can just miss the cutoff and get pulled from the course because they timed out.
“The way I look at that is you double failed,” says Hauth. “So, now you have to live with explaining the cutoff and the DNF. That’s the worst-case scenario. Let me at least have my day, as in not maybe the performance, but I’m going to do this for the full day, and I’m going to get myself to the finish line, even if I miss that cutoff or don’t finish due to that cutoff. But the soft quitting? Yeah, no, that’s unacceptable.”
So, I laced up my shoes. And I ran 34 miles in 3 days. Just to hit that arbitrary goal. And, also, so that future me wouldn’t need to put an asterisk next to my 2025 running total. Yes, I ran fewer miles last year than any other year since 2017, but by hitting at least 2,000, I won’t need to qualify it. The frivolous streak lives on (see below).
And speaking of frivolous but important things, I’d like to leave you with filmmaker and YouTuber Casey Neistat’s inspirational and decades-long quest to run a sub-3 marathon, which he captured in a short documentary called Sisyphus and the Impossible Dream.
As he nears the finish of his first sub3 marathon on his 25th attempt, the voiceover:
“You don’t just give up. You can’t just walk away. You get out there and you find that f*cking dog. …
You’re not out here because it’s easy. We do a lot of meaningless, purposeless, stupid things; we get obsessed, we spent years focused on them. And literally no one cares but you. But you persevere anyway. You keep running.
You keep running. You don’t quit. You die trying. Because when you add up all those stupid, meaningless obsessions and accomplishments, what they equal, what they add up to, is your life.”
Let’s make sure 2026 is different. And let’s keep those resolutions. They’ll be worth it.
