uinton, first off, can you tell us a little about yourself and your background? How did you get into running, and what sort of running and racing have you done over your 20 years as a runner? What has the sport meant to you over the years? Well, I’ m a father of three children, aged 20, 18 and 15, and while I always ran a little bit for fitness, I started running more seriously when I first became a father 20 years ago. At the time, running offered me small windows of time to fall into myself at a time when I was so focused on being a present father and husband. It didn’ t take long for me to fall deeper in love with the sport, and like many, 5km turned into 10, and 10 turned into a half marathon, and so on. Over the past two decades I’ ve run more than 20 marathons( I’ ve lost count of the official number), qualified for and run the Boston Marathon, run five of the six Abbott World Marathon Majors, and run Comrades three times. Running has been a beautiful reflection of the different phases of my life and has existed in my life as a constant. In reference to running, a therapist of mine once said“ It seems the only time you can truly breathe is when you’ re out of breath” – and that resonated with me deeply.
In a Running for Real podcast you talk about“ seasons of running”, and that it’ s only in the past five years that you’ ve developed a relationship with running outside of the physical. You talk about entering the“ adventure season” and the“ season of running through other people’ s experiences”. Can you expand on that for us, so we get a deeper sense of what you mean? It’ s a really interesting way of looking at the sport, and the broader role it can have in people’ s lives. Like many I fell into the sport through the physical“ season”. Running for me was always a measure of my physical ability and my mental fortitude.
It took a dark period in my life( a divorce), to force me to develop a new relationship with the sport. I simply couldn’ t train the way I used to during this period, but I loved the sport and was determined to find a way to keep it in my life. During this time, I discovered that I could run without a Garmin, and with no distance or time goal. I could simply lace up, head out the door, and enjoy moving through time and space on my own volition, and it unlocked an entirely new enjoyment of the sport, a new season of running. What was also interesting was that on some of those non-training runs, I actually FLEW! Sure some of those runs were filled with walk breaks, emotions and tears, but on some of those runs I ran faster than I had in my physical season –
As co-founder of
Escape, Quinton has organised ultra-relays from his home city of Toronto to New York, Boston and Chicago.
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