CHARLOTTE, N.C. (WBTV) – Jonathan Milkovich is in the middle of a 700-mile journey on foot over 17 days in the name of helping others.<\/p>\n
He stopped in Charlotte on Sunday with 270 miles and seven days down on his Operation Carolina<\/a> trek.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m living my dream right now. Every morning my job is to wake up and run. It\u2019s the best mission I\u2019ve had since I got out,\u201d said the retired United States Army soldier.<\/p>\n That mission is a part of Milkovich\u2019s non-profit, Operation Warrior Fit<\/a>, which \u201cempowers veterans, service members and first responders to maintain an active and healthy lifestyle by providing free or significantly discounted entries to active events and competitions.\u201d<\/p>\n Founded in 2026, the organization helps raise awareness for the challenges that people who\u2019ve served our communities and country have with mental health.<\/p>\n The run is part fundraiser and part recruitment, with Milkovich putting the emphasis on having conversations with veterans about mental health.<\/p>\n His purpose comes from watching his father work as a firefighter in Florida, his own military service and turning to endurance running after retiring from the Army to adjust to civilian life.<\/p>\n \u201cWe didn\u2019t see the deployments or the active war zones, but I was (in the) Airborne Infantry so you\u2019re still training to shoot other people. There\u2019s all this psychological stuff that comes with that,\u201d he said. \u201cWe ended up losing one of our guys to mental health while we were in.\u201d<\/p>\n His goal is to get people to find community by joining his non-profit, maintaining an active lifestyle and competing in endurance competitions just like he did.<\/p>\n The dream is to give as many veterans as possible a support system, so they have people to lean on if they go through mental health challenges.<\/p>\n \u201cMy hope is that the end of this I get a message a year and a half ago that someone that ran with us the first couple of days and they\u2019re doing their first half marathon or triathlon and they found that community to be with and this run was the reason they found that community,\u201d said Milkovich.<\/p>\n You can see if you qualify to join Operation Warrior Fit here<\/a> and apply here.<\/a><\/p>\n Copyright 2026 WBTV. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CHARLOTTE, N.C. (WBTV) – Jonathan Milkovich is in the middle of a 700-mile journey on foot over 17…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":865716,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[97,259,260],"class_list":["post-865715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-health","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=865715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/865716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=865715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=865715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=865715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}