Doubt as Divining Rod
I ran 26.2 miles in the mountains. Alone. (But this isn't a story about running.)
I paused at the corner of 110th and St. Nicholas, waiting for the light to change.
A short woman in running gear jogged up beside me, sweat beading at her brow. Like me, she had a tiny water bottle and energy gel packs crammed into the straps of her slender backpack—the telltale of a long run.
She gave me the nod—that silent exchange between women runners at night. A quiet acknowledgement that we were the same kind of crazy: Risking safety for sanity, or freedom, or just to clear our ruddy heads.
It was late fall. The New York City Marathon was weeks away, and runners had descended upon Manhattan, neon spandex scattered across Central Park like migratory birds.
“New York?” I asked, still catching my breath, grateful for the break.
“My second,” she replied, glancing at the light. “But it’s been a minute. You?”
A flicker of unease rose in me. Before I could answer, the Walk sign illuminated. I gave her a second nod and took off toward the park. It felt too complicated to explain.
For the past year, I’d spent nearly 200 cumulative hours training for something I wasn’t sure I could pull off: A 26.2 mile run through the mountains. Alone.
A year earlier, over Thanksgiving weekend, I was curled up on my friend Jeanie’s couch in the Poconos, ringing in my 37th birthday—and staring down unemployment. I was heading into the final semester of my MFA, and just before launching into the real world, I got laid off from my nonprofit job.
In its place, my school offered a full teaching load while I finished my thesis—what I suspected was the start of a book. But I was wrecked with doubt. Doubt that I could not only write a book, but sell it. Teach three classes. Avoid slashing through my savings before I figured it all out.
Jeanie—one of those steadfast, intuitive therapisty-types—knew exactly how long to let me wallow in the cushions, feeding me dark chocolate as I spiraled. Then, at just the right moment: “Alright,” she announced, tossing a bag of popcorn in the microwave. “We’re watching a movie.”
That night, we put on Nyad.
The biopic, starring Annette Bening as Diana Nyad, follows Nyad’s historic attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida. Nyad was born for the water—her name, from Greek mythology, means “water nymph.” In her twenties, she was a force: circling Manhattan, conquering the English Channel, and at 28, setting her sights on the impossible—a 110-mile swim through the shark-infested waters from Cuba to Florida.
She didn’t make it.
Storms and brutal currents dragged her off course, and 76 miles in, her team pulled her from the water. Defeated, she hung up her swimsuit and pivoted to sports broadcasting, relegating her dream to the sidelines.
Then, at 60, it crept back—along with the cultural messaging that, as an aging woman, she ought to fade quietly into irrelevance.
She thought: Fuck that.
Quietly, she returned to training. Her body, softer now, didn’t slice through the water like it once had. So she started small—20 minutes at a community pool. Then another 20. And another. Within six months, she was up to eight-hour swims.
One day, she turned to her best friend and trainer, Bonnie Stoll—played in the film by an impressively tanned Jodie Foster—and made a proclamation:
“This time, I’m doing it. I’m swimming from Cuba to Florida.”
I do not hail from an athletic lineage. My dad spent his life hunched over a microscope in his pathology lab, and my mom proudly served as the president of the Future Homemakers of America. We are not conquerors of water nor land. We are couch nymphs.
What I did inherit, however, was my Egyptian father’s bullish work ethic and his love of a screaming good deal. And as a sad-ish musician in my late twenties, I needed something to keep me sane on tour. Running fit the bill—it was cheaper than a gym membership and faster than twice-weekly therapy. I started small: a mile or two squeezed in before soundcheck.
At 30, I went back to college and trained for my first half marathon—mostly to prove to myself that I could. Then came my second. And third. I recruited Brandon, an online running coach, to keep me focused. I wasn’t fast, but that was part of the appeal. Having paused a decade-long music career to pursue writing (trading one notoriously lucrative field for another) the stakes in my professional life felt high. Running, by contrast, offered me a rare freedom—a space where I could strive for something, but ultimately, the outcome didn’t matter.
By the time I landed on Jeanie’s sofa, I was about to have everything I thought I needed to write my book: An MFA (which, let’s be clear, you do not need) and time. I’d workshopped hundreds of thousands of words. Edited three other people’s books. With no full-time job to distract me, it was time to write my own.
But I wasn’t sure I could. So instead, that night after Jeanie went to bed, I pulled out my phone and emailed my old run coach, Brandon:
“I want to run New York.”
What happens next follows the classic hero’s journey. At 61, having finally accepted her call to the water, Nyad assembles a ragtag team of sea-fairing mentors and allies—cue the training montage: sunburns, swim trunks, and tubs of Vaseline. She recruits a leathery ocean navigator, a tight-lipped sea captain, and a team of aquatic experts wielding tennis-ball-tipped polls (to ward off sharks, naturally).
Thirty-three years after her failed attempt, Nyad stands at the edge of the Atlantic—fists raised to the sky, cameras rolling, the world watching. She dives in, destined for greatness.
Then, she fails.
Halfway through her swim, her shoulder gives out. A medic mistakenly administers Advil—triggering an allergic reaction and an asthma attack.
A year later, she tries again. Boxed jellyfish nearly kill her. Another year, another attempt—a near-drowning. “I’m barely sore!” Nyad insists the next day. Thousands of dollars. Hours in the pool. Homes remortgaged. A fourth attempt.
“Welcome to the Titanic,” her navigator warns the new medic.
By now, another attempt seems delusional.
To everyone, but Nyad.
The morning after I emailed Brandon, I woke to two charges on my Chase debit card—one for run coaching, the other for entry to a half-marathon that spring. The half would land six months before the New York City Marathon. I grimaced, chugged a glass of water, and checked the run log Brandon had already posted for the day: two miles.
I laced up my tired sneakers, grabbed the dog leash, and with my black lab in tow, grumbled out Jeanie’s porch door.
The thing about running is that it’s never about running.
Like writing, it’s about freedom—from the onslaught of horrifying headlines, from the tedium of a whatever job, from the creeping fear your body won’t always be as pliable as it once was.
“I run in order to acquire a void,” Haruki Murakami writes in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. That quiet, peaceful emptiness. The kind I’ve only ever felt in pinpricks: Landing the exact right word in a sentence, the breath before singing my favorite lyric, the moment during impact when I lose all pretense and the animal takes over. Flow.
But for me, running is also about proof.
Proof that I am not the girl who was once so afraid of failure she drank ipecac to get out of a biology exam—or who ghosted half of freshman year. Proof that, over the years, I have grown more capable of managing my tendency toward annihilation.
Running feels like a healthy adaptation of the fear that if I stop moving, I’ll list toward self-destruction, like a floor you don’t realize is slanted until a marble rolls across the room. Look, every mile demonstrates. We’re fixing the floorboards.
But training for a marathon—like writing a book—is objectively a pain in the ass. I’d tried twice before and failed. By hour three of a long run, my knee screaming, I’d think: I have so little time, why the fuck am I not writing?
But by my 37th birthday, graduate school was almost done. The day job was almost done. I had a few hours to kick around on the pavement.
So, I heaved up Jeanie’s hilly block. Slow as hell.
The thing about running is that it’s never about running.
At 63, Nyad prepares for her fifth attempt. Everyone else is spent. Her navigator is dying of cancer. Her best friend Bonnie has walked away, too scared to watch Nyad drown—or worse, sink the team with her. Even the shark guy has taken a job installing AC units.
But Nyad, inexplicably, remains undeterred. Pathologically motivated, she resumes training.
I, on the other hand, was riddled with doubt. Each evening, I laced up my shoes and shuffled down 8th Avenue, squeezing in a few miles after adding a couple of hundred words to my manuscript. The runs were sluggish, the writing was muddied. I missed more than a few. But I kept training.
That Spring, I ran the half, submitted 80 pages of my thesis, injured my ankle, taught three classes, and got back on the road. Terrified of unemployment, I applied to graduate programs to become a therapist, got accepted, and realized I didn’t actually want to be a therapist. I was a writer.
I just didn’t want to be a broke one.
There was a bigger problem: I didn’t have a race.
The post-Covid runner boom had made landing a slot in the NYC Marathon near-impossible. I entered the lottery and wasn’t picked. Fine, I thought, I’ll fundraise for a slot with my old charity—nope, already gone. I considered Philly. Then, on a whim, I signed up for the Honolulu marathon in December. If I was going to shell out for a winter race, I might as well do it somewhere with a view.
Slowly, my word count progressed. Graduation came and went, and I passed 50,000, then 60,000 words. A publisher expressed interest. I panic-assembled a book proposal.
I went on a run.
The publisher passed, but a literary agent made me an offer.
I went on another run.
That summer, I did nothing but teach, run, write, and edit. I got hired to edit a memoir, and one book client led to another. I saw friends. I performed for the first time in years. I ran workshops and took workshops and prepared for a month-long residency at Swift Waters in Eastern PA. I ate out once a month, hoarded editing checks like a demented squirrel, and, somehow, didn’t go broke.
At the residency, something shifted: I had one month to focus on a single project. Every day, I woke up, wrote and researched until evening, then tacked on miles along a country road tracing the wide mouth of the Delaware. The writing was bad—much of it I would sooner light on fire than show anyone—but it got done. I stacked miles, stacked words. To cover rent, I drove down to the city to meet with editing clients.
By the end of the month, I had an 80,000-word draft and book proposal.
The race was supposed to be a metaphor. I was training for a marathon. But I was also training to be a lifelong writer—to finish a book.
In the film, Nyad isn’t once swayed by doubt. Her pathological belief in herself is inspiring—and exhausting. I couldn’t relate. My whole life, I’d been swimming against inertia and insecurity. Each time I overcame it—stepping onto a stage, earning a race medal, hitting a word count—I’d wake up the next day to find, like Sisyphus, my rock had tumbled right back down the hill.
But I had shit to do. So I lowered my head and got to work heaving it back up again.
In late summer, I was offered a full-time job back in trauma work. A salary, health insurance, stability. I left my writing residency a week early to start, hopeful I could balance it all—the job, race training, the book.
I was wrong.
My writing slowed to a drip. A bad flu knocked me out of training for two weeks. Then the agent, the one who had once seemed so sure, stopped responding to my emails. I queried new agents. The no’s trickled in. My mileage shrank. Doubt crept in.
What the hell had I done?
And then, Honolulu. My new job meant I couldn’t take the time off to fly to Hawaii for the race. For months, I’d pictured that final mile—barreling into the Pacific, victorious. Now, all of it was gone.
For a second, I considered scrapping the whole thing. The training, the mileage, the past year of discipline—maybe that had been enough?
But the truth was, I had never actually cared about running that marathon. I had cared about finishing one. And that didn’t require a crowd, or a finish line, or a medal. It just required me, alone, putting one foot in front of the other.
So, I pivoted. If I couldn’t run in Hawaii, I’d run solo in the Catskills, along a 28-mile rail trail I’d run in fragments with my black lab over the years. That trail was the reason I fell in love with the mountains. A route I had always promised myself I’d run in full someday.
That someday was now.
I recruited Jeanie and my friend Isabel as my pit crew, booked a rental car and cabin, and locked in the plan.
Then, three days before our reservation, a massive snowstorm pummeled Delaware County, burying the trail in black ice.
My boxed jellyfish.
“If the race doesn’t happen, I don’t care,” I told my boyfriend, slumped on the couch. I expected him to rub my back, to say I’d already put in a year’s work and that was plenty. Instead, he just looked at me and asked, “Is that really true?”
It wasn’t. But I was afraid of admitting I’d earnestly cared—and failed.
Called out, I Googled rail trails in Eastern Pennsylvania. Within minutes, I found one that was exactly 26.2 miles. It was in the Poconos, fifteen minutes from Jeanie’s cabin.
“Change of plans,” I texted Jeanie.
By the time Nyad arrives at her fifth attempt, the band is back together. Her navigator rallies for one last hurrah. Bonnie, after swearing she wouldn’t watch Nyad drown, decides she’d rather be at her side if it ends in a kamikaze event. A boxed jellyfish expert is recruited. An alien-like mask and wetsuit slouched on.
This final swim is a test of everything Nyad has learned. She plunges into the Atlantic, facing over two days of nonstop swimming—through darkness, cold, pain, jellyfish, sharks, exhaustion. A test of her will, her body, and her ability to silence anything—or anyone—who ever questioned her.
The night before my run, I stuffed my running pack with enough water and stroopwafels to get me to mile 19, where Jeanie and Isabel would be waiting with Casino, my dog, to refuel. I dropped an AirTag in my pack in case I got lost or injured or kidnapped and shared my location. We cooked spaghetti and piled onto Jeanie’s living room couch for one last carb-loaded dinner.
As we ate, I swirled my fork through the last of my pasta, debating whether to say it. Then, feeling both sheepish and a little ridiculous, I cleared my throat.
“Hey, guys…” I started, eyes on my plate. “Could we…watch Nyad?”
Jeanie smirked. Isabel cackled.
“To psych yourself up?” Isabel asked.
I shrugged. “I just…think it will help.”
Jeanie grabbed her laptop. “Absolutely.”
We abandoned the couch for her bed, Casino curled at our feet, and queued up Netflix.
For as many times as I’d watched and rewatched Nyad in the year leading up to my race, there was a pivotal scene I’d forgotten about—Nyad, sifting through her dead mother’s things, finds a dog-eared copy of Devotions by Mary Oliver.
“Don’t all things die?” she reads aloud to Bonnie.
Bonnie rolls her eyes—everyone knows what’s coming next—but Nyad presses on:
“Tell me—what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
I thought about my book, my day job, this bananas run—how, really, it all came down to the same thing: showing up. For the page, for the pavement. For my love of the process, even when doubt loomed large.
I went to bed uncertain if I’d make all 26 miles, but sure of one thing: I would try.
Race morning was crisp and bright—50 degrees and sunny. My anxiety did not melt with the frost. I drove to the trail alone. No crowd, no starting gun, just me stepping onto the path and—after a brisk pee in the bushes—running.
The first two or three miles were like mud, not physically, but because my insecurity came roaring back. Why are you doing this idiotic thing? Five miles felt impossible. I kept running.
A day and a half into her fifth attempt, Nyad starts losing her mind. Between sleep-deprivation and sun exposure, she begins to hallucinate, gasping at an aquatic Yellow Brick Road that stretches toward the Taj Mahal.
“The Taj Mahal! It's stupendous,” she yells up to Bonnie, crouched on the boat ahead.
The team looks alarmed. Without missing a beat, Bonnie shouts back: “Just head straight towards it, Diana!”
At mile five, my legs were stiff as trees. They loosened at ten. By mile fifteen, as I neared the turnaround point, I texted my run buddy: “I MIGHT ACTUALLY DO THIS?!!”
At mile nineteen, Jeanie and Isabel swerved into our meetup spot, Casino bouncing in the backseat. They jumped out, holding a Nyad-themed poster they’d made with Dollar Tree craft supplies: googly-eyed jellyfish, a felt Taj Mahal, bubble-lettered Mary Oliver.
I let Casino off her leash, grabbed a handful of potato chips, and as the sun sank below the Hemlocks, we took off, running the last seven miles in the cold.
Thirty-five years after she set out to swim from Cuba to Florida, Diana Nyad finally reached the shore. Stumbling onto the sands of Key West, face raw from saltwater, she pointed at the crowd of onlookers. “Never, ever give up,” she shouted. “You’re never too old to chase your dreams.”
After the run, I sat across from Jeanie and Isabel at a diner, devouring Belgian waffles and burnt eggs, wondering how I’d tackle what came next. I had no idea how I’d finish and sell my book while working full-time. Maybe I’d quit the job. Maybe I wouldn’t. I didn’t know.
Isabel jabbed me in the side. “Pass the syrup?” she said, nudging me out of my daze. I laughed, struck by what Nyad said to the cameras at the end of her swim, surrounded by her weather-beaten crew: "It looks like a solitary sport, but it takes a team."
Confidence isn’t certainty in the outcome. Confidence is recognizing what you can’t control, and trusting you’ll keep showing up anyway.
My biggest mistake was thinking doubt was some indicator I couldn’t do it. My second was believing the lie that anything worthwhile must be done alone.
“Doubt is like a divining rod; it begins to tug when it nears something fertile and fluid and underground.”
— Stacey D’Erasmo, “The Uses of Doubt.”
What if doubt isn’t a stop sign, but a signal you’re headed somewhere worthwhile? What if, instead of letting it paralyze you, you used it as a compass? What if that fear is just a glowing, yellow-brick hallucination?
Finishing the marathon hadn’t made me more certain that anything, really, would work out. But it did prove I could live with doubt and keep moving forward—that I didn’t have to feel Nyad-like certainty to commit. Confidence isn’t certainty in the outcome. Confidence is recognizing what you can’t control and trusting you’ll keep showing up anyway.
That’s true of running. But it’s also true of anything meaningful—writing, launching that business, falling in love. Making art has always felt the same: messy, uncertain, riddled with starts and stops. And like training, it’s made lighter by the company of others.
After the marathon, I didn’t wake up suddenly Disciplined in All Things. Writing still felt daunting most days. But so did the first, and fifth, and thirtieth training runs. The difference was, I now understood—bodily—that I didn’t have to go it alone.
It’s about showing up, day after day, mile after mile, trusting that even when doubt creeps in, the people who believe in you will be on the sidelines—holding a shark-shaped piñata, cheering you through it.
Aly
PS. This is my first post in over a year. I stepped back when my writing shifted to the book, and this will likely remain the case until I get through my next draft. I’ll return when I’ve got something worth sharing. In the meantime, I’ve paused billing. Thanks for sticking with me.
I was so happy to awaken to your post! I’ve been thinking about you and this essay is so vulnerable and simultaneously inspiring and uplifting. Self doubt is a universal, a unifier, yet most of us don’t know that others are experiencing it. As my beloved Daddy taught me, the key is perseverance and self patience and never giving up. You’re such a gifted creative (I woke up to my alarm playing Slow This Heart—hardly an incentive to get out of bed!). We’ve all been knocked down many times. You stood up and accomplished your goal. I KNOW you’ll accomplish the next one and publish the book, whether this year or the next. Take that extra deep breath because deep down *you* too know you can and will do it. I’m looking forward to seeing you on book tour. (Maybe you’ll even play a couple of songs!🎶) If you ever want to talk, I’m always here.
I've been a runner for 40 years and this is one of the best essays I've ever read about both running and all of the stuff we bring to that work. How it keeps us alive, present, and aware of our possibilities and failures. I've found the same with swimming and biking. They make me aware of who I am, who I might be, and who I would prefer not to be. Aly--you are such a gifted writer. You inspire me not only keep running but to also reflect on what it means. I was doing intervals along the CT River today with mixed success, and thought of you and this essay--and said to myself: be glad you are here. Moving. Striving. Trying.