Where Prediction Ends and Belief Begins

← Back to Journal

In April of 2019 an infection that began in my spine threatened to take my life. I spent the first ten days of it alone in my Minneapolis apartment, in an agony I still have no language for, until my parents drove up from Oshkosh and took me to the emergency room, where I was admitted almost immediately into the advanced care unit. By then it had become sepsis, liver failure, a pleural effusion in the lungs, a spinal abscess, discitis, and vertebral osteomyelitis, and I spent the two months that followed in a back brace and on a PICC line for the antibiotics, with at-home nursing care and my mother having moved into my one-bedroom apartment to take care of me. The medical staff were excellent, they were kind, they took great care of me, and they were honest, and honesty in that setting arrives as numbers, ranges of recovery, probabilities of function, averages drawn from everyone who had ever walked into a room with what I had.

What I noticed as I was recovering, healing, was something narrower and stranger than defiance. The numbers describing my odds were true, and they were also describing people who were not me. Every figure I was handed had been computed from a population I belonged to statistically and resembled in no other way, which meant that the average outcome was real and that the average was never me, in any sense that mattered.

A year later, in April of 2020, the world had folded in on itself and so had I. The pandemic was everywhere, the city was tense, and the helplessness I had spent months climbing out of hit me hard, and I was reliving my pain all over again. I was sick of feeling helpless and hopeless, a feeling I knew all the way down, having lived a different version of it a year before. I was meditating one evening when the decision arrived, clear and fully formed and slightly ridiculous, that I was going to run fifty marathons, even though before that spring I had never run more than seven or eight miles in my life. The decision itself was the defiance, a way of saying I would do this and nothing was going to stop me, that I was not going to live like this, unhappy and full of fear.

First I had to find out whether my body could even be brought to a start line, and I gave myself about three weeks to do it. I tried to research it, but I could not find a single case that resembled mine, so I pieced the plan together myself, and the idea was simple, to keep going, to stay mobile, and to do enough mobility work to let my body absorb the pounding. I began with three miles and added a mile every day until I reached fourteen, then spaced the longer runs a rest day apart, sixteen, eighteen, twenty, and twenty-two miles in the days before I ran the first one, in May of 2020. To be sure I finished, and to give my body small breaks along the way, I jogged five minutes and speed walked one to five, depending on what my body needed in that moment, over and over, for however long the distance took. None of it was validated at all, I simply decided to try it, because I trusted what I knew about my own body more than I distrusted a plan no one had signed off on.

None of these were official races, I ran every one of them on my own, marking off the full 26.2 miles myself. The first was in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on the path along Lake Winnebago, roughly six loops out from Ames Point and around Menominee Park and its small zoo. From there I covered the full 26.2 miles roughly every other day, however I could, out of the house around four thirty on work mornings to fit them in before the day started, and apart from the few I ran in Oshkosh, all the rest were along the Mississippi in Minneapolis, every mile of it tracked on my iPhone and Apple Watch. Calling it running is generous, because I walked, I jogged, I gutted out whatever the day would give me, never chasing a time and only ever trying to finish. I did not want to leave my dogs home alone for that long, so Bagel, a rescue from the early weeks of the pandemic, and Leo rode in a stroller while Ty ran beside me for the first half.

Late that May, in the middle of all this, George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, and the city I ran through became the center of the country's grief and upheaval. I kept running its streets while they carried something far larger than anything I was working through.

I remember feeling the heavy weight of it all out there, the emotions running through the city, the fear of the pandemic, and everything in my own life that had brought me to that point. What I remember of the running itself is not the finishing so much as everything that led to it, the difficulty and the frustration, the mornings I woke beyond tired and made myself rise anyway, the sunrises that found me a few miles in, the tears of hardship and the tears of joy, and all that those hours taught me about who I am. Fifty marathons in a little over three months, a year after surviving a near-death spinal infection, looked impossible even to me, and the only way through was to make it ordinary.

I made it through every one of them the same way, by tracking my body as I had always tracked anything that mattered, because measurement was how I made sense of the world long before it was my profession. I logged the mileage on every pair of shoes so I knew to retire them at 350 miles, read the signals my body sent me, slowed down when it asked me to and pushed harder on the mornings it let me. Every run taught me something I could carry into the next, the stride that held up over the miles and the one that wore me down, the fuels that left me empty and the one that did not (watermelon juice for the win), the pace I needed to hold to finish at all, and the difference between serious pain and muscle burn. There was discipline in it, and love, and dedication, and a stubbornness I had always known was in me but never admitted to, one I finally made a strength rather than a flaw, and a refusal to stop that carried me through the darkest period of my life, because I had decided I would finish no matter what, whether or not anyone believed I could.

There was no model that would have predicted this, because the input had no precedent. I had never been the person who could do it, so nothing in my history could contain me and nothing could have forecast me, and in the most literal sense I was out of sample.

There is a piece of this the averages could never have held, and it is the thing about myself I have come to trust most. The version of me that survived was good enough to reach that point and no further, and going past it meant being willing to see that my old mentality was outdated, and I needed to upgrade, to raise my own standards. I think of resilience as a kind of prior, a hard-earned belief in my own capacity, and adaptability as the update, the willingness to keep rewriting my own programming as the conditions change. The aim never moved, only the method did, and the harder things pressed on me, the more I had to press back. That capacity to keep updating is what no population drawn from people like me could ever see, and it is the part of my own prior I lean on most when I try to predict where I am headed next.

What took me longest was making peace with how that kind of change feels, because choosing to outgrow the version of me that had survived seemed, at first, like abandoning myself, when it was nearer to the opposite. A posterior never throws the prior away, it absorbs it and carries it forward and becomes the starting point for the next update, so to change is not to lose myself, it isn't to disown myself or my past, it is the only way I stay continuous with who I am. The version that survived is still in here, folded into the one writing this now, the way every prior goes on living inside the posterior it became.

What drove me was never really the running, it was the need to prove to myself that the person the numbers had nearly written off could still do something no one saw coming, my own out-of-sample moment, an event no distribution drawn from my past could have predicted, an outcome those distributions had effectively placed at a probability near zero. Through all of it, the long recovery and the months I could not stand without help, the one thing in me that never wavered through every marathon was a longing for what is actually true within me and my connection to everything outside of me, whether that truth be comfortable to my psyche or not.

There is a paradox in all of this that I have spent endless nights pondering, through theological reading, through historical study, through meditation and breathwork, and through mathematical and analytical reasoning, from the Upanishads to the teachings of Jesus to the Bhagavad Gita to the teachings of the Buddha, to the Tao Te Ching, to the mysticism of the Persian poets like Rumi, to the songs of Kabir, to the contemplative work of Thomas Merton, to the writings of Martin Luther King and Gandhi, to the cosmos of Carl Sagan, and so many others. I am no expert in any of it, I came to these works for my own exploration and understanding, and all of it sat alongside years of consumer behavior research and economics, the formal training I came up through, none of which gave me the answers I was actually seeking.

What all of it handed me, in all honesty, was a paradox I keep circling rather than a clean answer. There was peace in that, because where I once wanted a “truth” to lean on, something almost binary, I became comfortable living in the paradox. I say all of this because, humbly speaking, the conclusion I keep coming back to after all those nights is that no one could have predicted any of it, not the infection, not the long chain of moments that led up to it, not the recovery or the turmoil or the strength it took to carry forward. Even my turning to those readings at all, an atheist for most of my life moving across that whole range, was completely unpredictable, let alone surviving to do any of it. The seeking did not come out of the illness, the way these turns often do in stories like mine. I had already become a seeker about a year before the infection, and the reading was well underway by the time it arrived. If someone had told a younger me that this was where I would end up, I would have said they were nuts.

The strange part is that the full account of how I arrived here is not just a sequence of events, it is every thought I have ever had, every fear and belief and decision, the shape of my psyche and the pattern of my behavior, the interior life that no dataset we know how to build today could ever capture, and all of it is nonetheless real. If you could lay that complete record out and trace it in order, it would lead you, without a single gap, to exactly where I am sitting now. The account does not even begin with me. It reaches back past my own thoughts into everything that shaped them, my parents and everything they experienced, and theirs before them, a line with no clean edge where I could say the record starts, and none of it comes apart cleanly. This is the paradox I keep returning to, that every step was mine to take and every step was already set in motion long before me, that I acted freely and was fully caused, and both are true at once. Looking back, it was all perfectly predictable, and in the living of it, it was unpredictable at every step.

This is the asymmetry at the center of every story ever told, every turn in history, every life, that the past fits a clean line in hindsight while the future yields to no forecast at all. Part of what makes the forward problem, really a problem of prediction, so hard is that a life, like a market, is chaotic in the precise sense, driven less by any single cause than by the dense web of interactions running through it, the interactions between a person and the people and experiences around them, and, in the language of measurement, the interaction effects in which the influence of any one thing depends on the level of everything else it touches. Those interactions multiply faster than any dataset can hold them, which is why the main lines of a system can be estimated while its full behavior and a complete explanation of it stay beyond reach.

The truth of what drives a person, or a market, is fully real and almost never fully observed, and the whole enterprise I have given my career to is a long reaching toward it, an attempt to seek that truth, to explain it, and to predict the next small piece of it, knowing the complete picture stays just past the edge of anything we can fully measure.