RUNNING CLEARS MY HEAD LIKE NOTHING ELSE.

Published by: 14/05/2026 | By: Alex Courbat

You might have seen Jake Quickenden on the telly. You might follow him on social media. You might think you know who he is. But the truth is, until you meet Jake in real life, you never quite appreciate the kind of person he is – or the experiences that shaped him. From ADHD to grief, anxiety and fatherhood, this is the story of how running became far more than fitness. This is the story of why Jake runs.

There’s a moment early in the conversation with Jake Quickenden where you realise what you see is genuinely what you get. We’re talking about his first HYROX race when he casually tells me that, on the morning of the event, he stopped at Costa for a coffee and ended up chatting to a stranger editing videos nearby. The guy recognised him, asked what he was doing that day, and – just like that – offered to film the race. Jake asked how much. They agreed on a price over flat whites and headed off together.

At some point on the way there, the conversation turned to nutrition. Fair enough – they were on their way to one of the most physically demanding fitness races around. Naturally, the cameraman asked what Jake had eaten to prepare. “Papa John’s and tater tots,” Jake says, grinning.

For the rest of the race, every time Jake overtook someone, his new mate screamed, “Papa John’s made him do it!” from the sidelines. They still message each other now. Jake laughs telling the story, slightly baffled by it himself. But it also feels very him – warm, impulsive, completely open to whatever – or whoever – the day brings.

That openness probably explains why so many people feel like they know Jake already. But to really understand him, you need to go back to long before the cameras, before the shows, before he became a public figure at all.

Growing up in Scunthorpe, sport was everything. His dad Paul encouraged him to try every activity possible until something clicked. Football came first and came naturally, but there were signs early on that running might too.

Jake remembers lining up for a schools cross-country race around the age of 14 and confidently telling his PE teacher he was going to win the whole thing. She laughed it off. He won anyway.

At the time he wasn’t even training as a runner. He was simply fit from football and naturally competitive. Soon after, he was selected to run for the English Schoolboys. But one memory from that period still frustrates him now. Heading into a race he thought he might lose, terrified of disappointing his dad, Jake pretended to injure himself after stepping in a rabbit hole. Looking back, he shakes his head at it. Not because his dad expected him to win – but because afterwards he realised the pressure had existed entirely in his own mind. “My dad didn’t care whether I won,” he says. “He just wanted me to enjoy it.”

Football eventually took over. Jake played in Australia for two years and spent much of his early adulthood immersed in sport, performance and ambition. Running drifted into the background. Then life changed completely. His dad died from bone marrow cancer. Not long afterwards, his younger brother Oliver passed away from osteosarcoma at just 19 years old. The losses changed everything.

Grief doesn’t always arrive dramatically. Sometimes it settles quietly into your life and reshapes it from underneath. For Jake, it left behind anxiety, insecurity and a constant awareness of how fragile life really is. At the same time, his television career exploded. The X Factor brought recognition. I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! made him a household name. Dancing on Ice crowned him champion in 2018. From the outside, he looked confident, funny, completely comfortable in himself. Inside, things often felt very different. “Doing TV opens you up to criticism from people you’ve never met,” he says. “That feeds anxiety.”

He knows people are surprised when he says that. He doesn’t fit the stereotype. But anxiety, he explains, rarely looks the way people expect it to. Sometimes it arrives for no obvious reason at all. Some days your head simply feels heavier than others. What he eventually discovered was that running helped quieten the noise. “If I’m stressed or anxious or feeling low, I put my trainers on and go,” he says. “Sometimes I don’t even have music on. I just run.”

There’s something almost reverential in the way he talks about what happens afterwards. “I never go on a run and come back with more muddled thoughts,” he says. “I always come back clearer.” That clarity completely changed his relationship with exercise. There was a time, he admits openly, when fitness was mostly aesthetic – about looking good, staying in shape for television and social media. Now the reason runs much deeper. “Now I do it because it’s good for my brain.” It’s a simple sentence, but it sits at the heart of everything.

Running isn’t about proving anything anymore. It’s about balance. Stability. Finding moments of peace in the middle of a noisy life. Living with ADHD makes the structure of training especially valuable too. Marathon plans give him routine, and routine gives him focus. The repetition of training steadies him in a way few other things can. And beneath all of it sits another huge motivation: fatherhood.

Jake talks about his children with immediate softness. Becoming a dad recalibrated everything – ambition, priorities, success. “As far as achievements go,” he says, “being a dad is bigger than anything else.” Watching both his father and younger brother battle cancer left him deeply aware of time and health. He thinks often about longevity, about being active for as long as possible, about the kind of dad he wants to be decades from now. “I want to still be able to play football in the garden with my boys when I’m older,” he says. “I want to still be moving.” That desire now fuels much of his running.

He’s completed several marathons, although the first humbled him completely. Like many first-timers, he underestimated what the distance really demands. He laughs remembering how broken he felt afterwards, barely able to walk. But marathons have a habit of pulling people back in. What keeps him returning isn’t necessarily pace or finish times. It’s the simplicity of the sport itself. “A lot of sports are about beating other people,” he says. “Running feels different. It’s about bettering yourself.”

That idea clearly matters to him. He speaks with genuine admiration about people fitting training around work, parenting and ordinary life. The runners squeezing miles in before sunrise. The parents running after bedtime because it’s the only spare hour they have. Those are the runners he relates to now because he understands how difficult consistency becomes once life happens.

And he knows a thing or two about that. One recent afternoon disappeared entirely into rebuilding part of his son Leo’s Lego because a single piece had been put in the wrong place. Three hours later, Jake had fixed it perfectly. Leo came home and barely noticed. “But I did it for him,” Jake shrugs. That’s fatherhood really – quiet acts of love nobody else sees. And maybe that’s why running matters so much now too. It’s one of the few things that belongs entirely to him. A space to process, breathe and reset. And, increasingly, something he wants to share.

Recently, he took Leo to a 2K fun run. By Jake’s own admission, his son hated most of it. But crossing the finish line, getting a medal and hearing people cheer sparked something. Jake saw pride flicker across his face. He recognised it immediately. He’s trying to pass on the best parts of what his own dad gave him: encouragement, movement, confidence, joy. Just without the pressure he once placed on himself as a child desperate not to disappoint.

There’s something quietly moving about that. A man who watched two people he loved lose their lives to cancers affecting the bones now encouraging his own children to grow stronger in theirs. For Jake Quickenden, running has never really just been about running. It’s been grief and healing. Anxiety and release. Structure and escape. A way of coping with loss while becoming the father he wants his children to remember.

He still hesitates to call himself a runner. But perhaps that’s exactly why his story resonates. Because Jake doesn’t run to prove anything to anyone else. He runs because somewhere between all the noise in his life and the rhythm of his footsteps, he finds clarity again.

And sometimes, that’s enough.