Jack Wilson was not born to run. Entering the world many weeks premature, he weighed just under 2 pounds at birth. Emergency, lifesaving intubation inflated both of Wilson’s collapsed lungs but left serious internal scarring. Though he survived, doctors told his parents not to expect any more miracles. Their son would never be anything like an athlete.
Those doctors were wrong — like, really wrong.
Wilson, now 57 and a Harpswell Neck resident, has a storied high school and collegiate running career behind him. Finishing his first marathon at age 16, Wilson went on to conquer something like 200 more in the next 40 years. On top of that, he’s completed 10 Ironman triathlons — 140-mile races that combine a marathon with long-distance swimming and cycling.
At age 50, Wilson went even further by getting into ultramarathons — grueling off-track footraces that often exceed 50 miles. In 2022, he finished the Moab 240, perhaps the most formidable ultramarathon of them all.
The remote, 241.8-mile course winds its way through Utah’s slickrock southern desert, up and over 31,000 feet of elevation gain. Runners must finish the race in fewer than 112 hours, which means running nearly around the clock, on very little sleep. Almost half of those who start do not finish. Wilson was hauled away by ambulance on his first try in 2021.
But, as always, he kept on running and finished the race the next year, running about 96 hours out of his overall time of 106 hours. Failing is one thing, but giving up is something he just doesn’t contemplate.
Retired from a life in corporate sales, these days Wilson works as a motivational speaker, taking his stick-with-it-and-work-hard message to civic and business groups across the country. He’s also working to start an ultramarathon in Presque Isle that would be one of the biggest on the East Coast. He hopes the event, coming in the fall of 2027, will draw the same kind of national and international attention as the Moab race.
Wilson’s life of running almost never started. Given his fragile birth and unlikely survival, his mother wanted to keep him safe during his childhood in Tennessee and North Carolina.
“She was definitely a very wonderful mother, but extremely overprotective for anything that even remotely looked like it might cause a sweat,” he said. “That was always the litmus test. I could do anything as long as it didn’t involve sweating.”
But at a YMCA summer camp, Wilson, then 8, told a fib when a coach asked if anyone could run around the track four times, which is a full mile. Wilson raised his hand. The coach looked puzzled and asked if he was the kid who wasn’t supposed to sweat.
“I cut him off and told him, ‘No, you’ve got me confused with some other kid,'” Wilson said.
And off he went, running the mile in seven minutes and 48 seconds, well under the 10 minutes or so most beginners take to finish the distance. Wilson still has the three blue ribbons he won that summer for running.
“From then on, I was like Forrest Gump — everywhere I was going, I was running,” he said. “It just unlocked eight years of frustration. It was such a blessing for me.”
The feeling of complete freedom and focus Wilson experienced that day has never left him.
“To this day it’s my security blanket, my binky,” he said. “People ask me all the time how I can go running in all kinds of weather. They don’t get it. They’re looking at it as a physical thing. For me, it’s more mental, spiritual. It’s still a release.”
Wilson excelled in high school track and cross-country, setting North Carolina state records that stood for 20 years. He attended Memphis State University on a track scholarship before embarking on his corporate career, all the while running scores of marathons.
“I’ve even run marathons in Tokyo and Bangkok just because I was going to be there for work,” he said.
In the summer of 2021, amidst a rancorous divorce, Wilson left his home in Atlanta and moved into an RV parked in a friend’s driveway on Ewing Narrows in Harpswell. He’d come to Maine for some peace while training for his first attempt at the Moab 240 later that year.
He eventually became friends with a woman who lived across the street from his RV. She would see Wilson leaving on his long, early morning training runs and eventually agreed to be his Moab crew chief, arranging food, water and shoe drops at checkpoints along the punishing route.
She was there when a doctor at one of those checkpoints told Wilson he couldn’t finish the race because his kidneys were shutting down from dehydration. She watched Wilson flash two thumbs up as he left in an ambulance — and somewhere along the way, their relationship became more than friendly.
Thus, she was also there when Wilson finally finished the Moab 240 a year later. At the finish line, he was more than tired. He could barely stand up straight, his body was in so much pain. His feet were a mangled mess, having lost all ten toenails in the race. Still, he got down on one knee in the gravel and asked her to marry him, pulling out a ring he’d carried in his shorts pocket all 240 miles.
“I told myself I had to finish so I could ask her,” Wilson said. “It kept me going.”
She said yes.
“And I had to help him up off his knee because he couldn’t get up,” the now Melissa Wilson said. “He hurt so much.”
With Moab conquered and his personal life in full bloom, Jack Wilson has plans to start an ultramarathon in Presque Isle called the Maine Moose. It will be, of course, 207 miles long, and it will utilize a crisscrossing network of existing ATV and snowmobile trails.
Collin Darrell, community impact director at the nonprofit Ignite Presque Isle, is partnering with Wilson on the ultramarathon project. With Limestone’s Loring Air Force Base long closed, the once-thriving Nordic Ski Center defunct, and the 1997-2003 series of Phish festivals all in the past, Darrell said Aroostook County is hungry for a nationally known event like the race.
“I think it will mean millions of dollars for the region,” Darrell said, “and not just in tickets but in visitors dining and staying and spending money — and then spreading the gospel of how beautiful Aroostook County is.”
Though there’s a lot of organizing to do before the big race can take shape, Wilson isn’t done running — not by a long shot. He trains every day in Harpswell, usually covering 20 miles or more, mostly on side roads and the nearby Cliff Trail.
“A day off for me would be a 5-mile run,” he said.
In May, he’ll run a 100-mile race through the Florida Keys.
“It’s my 58th birthday present to myself,” he said.
