An Indiana Man Is About to Run 300 Miles to Chicago – He Says the Kids He’s Running For Have It Harder

Kyle Rauguth has run one 50-mile race in his life. Starting August 17, he plans to run that distance six days in a row — back to back, sunup to sunup, from the banks of the Ohio River in Evansville to the doors of Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, 300 miles north.

It is, by any measure, an absurd undertaking for someone who laced up his first pair of real running shoes in the fall of 2024. But Rauguth isn’t doing this to prove something to a finish-line clock. He’s doing it for kids he sees every week and will likely never meet on the trail: the children in Lurie’s cardiac unit, where he works as an anesthesia technician.

“Every mile is for the kids whose hearts are fighting harder than any finish line ever could,” Rauguth said of the run, which he’s calling Miles for Little Hearts.

From rock bottom to the road

Rauguth’s ultrarunning career began, in a roundabout way, with a broken engagement and a long fight with addiction — both of which hit in 2024. He has been open about how that year stripped away the version of his life he thought he was building, leaving him to sit with himself, sober, for maybe the first time.

Running became the thing that filled the silence. Not as an escape, he says, but as the opposite of one — a place with no numbing and no distractions, just discipline and one foot in front of the other. A rabbit hole of ultramarathon documentaries turned into training runs, which turned into his first 50-miler in 2025, a race he describes as the moment he found himself again.

A year later, he’s attempting something built for a very different reason. Miles for Little Hearts is a fully self-supported, six-day, 300-mile run tracing a route from Evansville up through Indiana and into Illinois before ending at Lurie Children’s front doors — averaging 50 miles a day, roughly two marathons’ worth, every single day, for six consecutive days.

Why Lurie’s heart center

Rauguth’s day job put the cause directly in front of him. As an anesthesia technician at Lurie Children’s, he works alongside the hospital’s Heart Center, which U.S. News & World Report ranks among the top pediatric cardiology and heart surgery programs in the country and which runs the only pediatric heart transplant program in Illinois. Its 50-bed Regenstein Cardiac Care Unit keeps a cardiology attending physician on site around the clock for children recovering from some of the most complex heart defects a newborn or child can face.

Money raised through Rauguth’s run goes directly to that Heart Center — funding care, research and support for families navigating a pediatric heart diagnosis, according to his fundraising page.

“Their strength, their families’ resilience, and the fight they face is far beyond this journey,” Rauguth wrote. “Every step is a reminder that while this run is temporary pain, their fight is ongoing and worth showing up for.”

As of this week, his online fundraiser had already pulled in more than $6,500 toward the effort, with donations still coming in ahead of the August 17 start.

Rauguth is starting Miles for Little Hearts in Evansville, turning a local runner’s personal reckoning into a six-day, cross-state broadcast for a Chicago children’s hospital. He’s planning to document the route mile by mile on Instagram (@raugie.runs), posting video updates as he moves through Indiana and into Illinois.

It’s a route that mirrors, in a way, the path so many Indiana and downstate Illinois families already take by car when a local hospital can’t treat their child’s heart condition and Chicago is the only option left. Rauguth is just doing it on foot, at 50 miles a day.

How to follow along or help

Rauguth says he’s happy to share interviews, live location updates and photos as the run unfolds, and welcomes coverage along the route or once he reaches Chicago.

• Donate or follow his progress: Miles for Little Hearts fundraiser page
• Follow the run in real time: Instagram, @raugie.runs

Rauguth starts in Evansville on August 17. If his pace holds, he’ll cover the length of six marathons, one for every day of the week most families spend simply hoping their kid makes it through surgery, before he reaches Lurie’s front doors sometime around August 23.