There have been times in Quinton Jacobs’ running life when he chased PRs and qualifying times. Those were physical seasons. He’s also had mental health and adventure seasons, and seasons of running through other people’s experiences. Sometimes, as in the Escape ultra relays he creates, the seasons merge.
Whatever the season, he says, “Running can be such a beautiful reflection of the different phases of your life, if you let it. I’ve been lucky to be running for well over 20 years. I’m so blessed when I look back at all these different phases of my running journey, because it really does reflect different parts of my life. And I am so happy about this phase right now.”
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It took going through a divorce for Quinton to develop a relationship with running outside of the physical. He discovered the mental health season, leaving his watch at home and processing his thoughts. “It didn’t automatically mean I ran slow. Some of my mental health runs, I ran fast. I just went how my body felt. Sometimes I went at a snail’s pace, and sometimes I blazed through my emotions. But that was the first time that I acknowledged and recognized how much more dynamic the sport of running is.
“And that led me to uncover all these other seasons of running, which is where I’ve been having the most fun. I’ve been running for over 20 years now, and I’ve done the most fantastic and incredible things within the sport of running in the last, say, five years, when I was completely outside of the physical season of running.”
Over the past few years, he’s been immersed in the third and fourth seasons. “There’s this adventure side of running, right? You’re running from LA to Vegas, or you’re running in Alaska, or through Chile, or on all these relays. You’re not necessarily thinking about your pace if there’s this gorgeous landscape around you, you’re with the coolest people you can imagine. That to me is such a special season. And the fourth season that I like to think about is running through other people’s experiences, through their legs, through their journey, running with the youth programs, for instance, that I’ve met.”
In 2019, he and a friend came up with an idea for an ultra relay that would combine adventure and community. They called it “Escape.” “Escape was just a crazy idea between myself and a running friend, my buddy Andrew. Can we get a bunch of friends and run from Toronto to New York City? Runners do stupid things and that was one of the things that we decided we were gonna try to do. The key was we would run to New York City but we’d get there just before the New York City Marathon.
“I’d been trying to get into New York for years and it turned out New Balance was a sponsor of it. They found out about what we were doing and gave us registrations to run the New York City Marathon when we got there. So we were gonna run nonstop from Toronto to New York City and a few days later run the New York City Marathon as a victory lap.
“We have homies in New York; we were friends with the Bridge Runners and a lot of those guys. So we hollered at them and we made it sort of a crew kind of endeavor. What was cool about that is when we left Toronto, all of our homies in Toronto were there with us to run that send-off leg. But also when we arrived in New York, you’ve got this community of people waiting because half of the team was from New York. So there was this real opportunity to lean into the community aspect of it, and as a result, we steered away from the idea of a race. We were like, no, Escape’s not a race. It’s a connection adventure through running, using running as a tool. And it was a not-for-profit type thing.”
Unfortunately, Quinton injured his Achilles and although he accompanied the team as support, he was unable to run. “There was obviously unfinished business and it got a bit of underground popularity. So everyone kept saying, ‘When’s the next Escape to New York?’ And we were like, we don’t have to do New York. It could be whatever we want it to be. We did New York already and I love Chicago.
“So a few years later we did Escape to Chicago. Similar format, we reached out to crews in Chicago and it was about making sure that we were celebrating the community that we were running to. Seven on Sundays, all that crew, we folded them into the mix and we were able to run from Toronto to Chicago and run the Chicago Marathon once we got there.
“And that sort of birthed this idea of Escape. What’s it going to be? Where’s it going to go? Didn’t matter. All that matters is it’s not a race. It’s going to celebrate the people in the communities that we run through and to. It’ll usually snowball towards a race or an event. And it will always have a giving back portion. It will always be about giving back.”
There was an Escape to Boston, and one in France, to the Paris Olympics. The next Escape, next April, is one that’s personal to Quinton, whose mother was born in Cape Town, South Africa. “We’re going to be running non-stop, our longest Escape, 950 kilometers from the east side of South Africa and we’re finishing in Cape Town. And on the way we’re stopping in a township just outside of Cape Town and we’ve organized a 5K with the kids from Mitchell’s Plain where we’re gonna be raising money and awareness for Run for Schools. There’ll be over a hundred kids and we’re organizing this run to sort of fold them into this madness for a really incredible weekend.
“We partnered with Run for Schools, a beautiful organization, and the work that they do in this township is incredible. We’ve got some superstars in the global running community as a part of this project, and once it starts to open up and people see what’s going on, I think there’s a real capacity to do something special. We’ve talked about building a track in Mitchell’s Plain, which is what I’d love to do. I’d love to see if we could build a track. There’s a lot of politics and red tape, so the timeline may not line up, but it’s something that I’d love to work towards. We’re working on a mural project, so we’re going to be creating some murals along the 5K route and incorporating some of the kids in those murals, and then we’ll unveil them when we do the run.”
The final event of the Escape will be running the Two Oceans Marathon in Cape Town. “It’s special, it’s magical when these different worlds collide and you’re able to somehow find a way to merge all the things that you love and the people that you love into one moment that we’ll be able to look back and live back,” Quinton says. “And bringing friends and family from all over the world to South Africa, it was also important to me that you don’t get to just experience Cape Town through Table Mountain and Chapman’s Peak and some of the beautiful sort of things. To me, the beauty in the country comes in the layers. It’s in the people, which is why going into Mitchell’s Plain is important. Seeing these other areas and the history of the country are important.
“Because you see it with the majors, right? People go to Tokyo and they leave and all they have is the same photo with those sort of orange things in the back and a medal. And they don’t really get a chance to savor the beauty of the country that they’re running through. And so this won’t be that.
“I don’t want to take away from racing; I think racing is incredible. Pushing yourself, pushing your limits, the dedication, the determination, the consistency that comes from training is so important and we carry those characteristics throughout our entire lives. So it’s important, but it’s not everything. And you can turn the dials depending on where you are and you can decide. Not every race has to be a PB. I think it’s just really understanding that the sport’s more dynamic. It’s more versatile. It’s bigger, and there’s so much more that you can experience through the sport. It’s like a buffet, right? You can just go to the shrimp every single time, but there’s other stuff there.”
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