FORT WAYNE – A prerequisite for running with Mike Ehredt is you have to carry a flag.
He has up to 300 of them at a time, small United States flags on little wooden rods stored inside his cart along with the several pounds of food, water and Gatorade he pushes ahead of him every single day. Each flag comes with a yellow ribbon attached, and that’s where he tells you to hold it – right at the ribbon, so that it doesn’t fall off.
This also allows you to see the name scrawled there.
Since May 1, when he started in the waters of the Pacific Ocean off the shores of Oregon, Ehredt has been running across the country, looking to complete a trek of more than 4,000 miles when he eventually hits the Atlantic Ocean.
But after each mile he completes, he stops, digs out a flag, plants it in the ground wherever he is and pauses, giving a salute in honor of each name on each ribbon – an Iraqi War veteran killed in action.
“It’s my own personal tribute,” he says. “I’m not doing it to bring attention to any cause or anything.”
The major wheels behind Project America Run, an organization he created for this run, Ehredt is a retired postal clerk from Idaho who served in the Army from 1979 to 1983. He plans to plant one flag for every soldier killed in Iraq in reverse chronological order, so the last flag he plants in Rockland, Maine, will be the first death.
And Friday, he ran through Fort Wayne.
The travels
The Midwest can get hot. Just how hot is something Ehredt found out when he ran through Iowa.
Heat constantly blasted his face, he said, and he went through long stretches where there were no towns, no gas stations or rest stops, no place to get a short respite from the inferno. At times, it seemed like there was nothing but eternity surrounding Cedar Rapids.
“It bent me, but I didn’t break,” Ehredt said of the weather.
Pushing his cart of flags, food and beverages, Ehredt runs roughly 5 mph, completing from 25 to 30 miles most days. His rest days consist of “short” five- to eight-mile runs, just to keep active.
At 49, Ehredt’s had an on-again, off-again affair with running. He was a runner for a while, but then he took 15 years off. Then five years ago he began running again and at some point began hashing out the idea to plant flags across the country.
“I just wanted to do something,” he said.
It’s hard for him to decide what his favorite leg of the journey has been so far. Nebraska was surprisingly hilly, he said, but northern Illinois was good, too, since a relative lives there. The mountains are always sweet.
“Everything is so different topographically, it’s really hard to pick,” he said.
One of the best parts of the trip is when people join him. High school cross country teams will fall in with him sometimes, and other times he’ll just pick up random runners who’ve either heard about him on the news or just start running with him after they ask about the cart and the flags.
Everywhere he’s been he’s had a family to host him, to give him a home to spend the night. His organization also takes donations, with one private donor recently giving $140,000 to the cause. He has also found nearly $15 in change during his travels.
In addition to paying for his run, donations will go to private rehabilitation programs for veterans who have returned from Iraq, his website said.
Friday, University of Saint Francis cross country coach Sarah Thrall, a family friend, and Vietnam War veteran Don Lindley joined him on the Towpath Trail. Around one curb, a Doberman began barking at the group, which caused Thrall to ask Ehredt: How many dogs had attacked him?
Ehredt held up one finger.
“I pepper-sprayed it right between the eyes,” he said. “It was a little Australian shepard thing. It happened in Idaho.”
The names
“Just hold it right there,” Ehredt said, pointing to the little yellow ribbon below the flag. “That way, it won’t fall.”
One of these ribbons Friday has the name Ronald Baker written on it, a 34-year-old from Cabot, Ark., and a National Guard enlistee. In 2004, an improvised explosive device ripped apart his patrol vehicle in Taji, Iraq.
He died six days later in Germany.
Ehredt is checking the electronic gauges attached the handle of his cart. He’s coming to the end of another mile and points to two yellow concrete posts on the Towpath Trail. He decides that’s the spot for Baker’s flag, that people might see it better there.
Before he plants it, he clicks a button on one of his gadgets.
A summary of Baker comes up, and it also updates on the Web the exact location where his flag is planted, so anyone online can see where it is.
He’s planted more than 3,000 of these flags and has more than 1,100 more to go.
“I can see the water’s edge,” he said, referring to the end of his journey.
The names, though, have never been lost on him.
He has a blog that he updates regularly, relating his thoughts as he runs. Thursday, he wrote about an encounter with a woman in her 50s in Indiana.
The woman approached him and told him, “You have my nephew.”
He had already planted it, but he remembered the name vividly, a 26-year-old man named Chad Lake, from Ocala, Fla. Ehredt remembered his aunt had placed the flag for him outside Galena, Ill., late last month.
“What are the chances that I would meet the aunt of this soldier on an obscure road out of 4,417 names?” Ehredt wonders in his blog, describing how the woman began to cry and how she walked away from him.
It’s encounters like those that keep Ehredt going, keep him moving through the hills, the mountains and the corn, just like he did Friday, when, after 1,900 more steps, his electronics began to tell him another mile was up, another flag had to be planted, another soldier honored.
