Walking vs Sprinting. Distance per Calorie testing.

[diffeq]

Distance was arbitrary, as I only needed the ratio. Thus, I traveled back and forth between ML->CampOffice and a boulder. I called that 1 km.

Walking: 24.8 sec, 21 cal = 21 cal / km.

Sprinting (Free Runner): 11.6 sec, 14 cal = 14 cal / km.

Thus, sprinting (Free Runner) covers the same distance for only 66.7% of the calories as walking.
I didn't test non-FreeRunner, but the tooltip "25% less calories" suggests that non-FreeRunner sprinting costs 85.7% calories as walking.

In my opinion, this makes Free Runner an exceptional badge for farming at a base camp, where fatigue is not an issue.

Free Runner is also great for long distance travel, with the caveat that you are able to bedroll often to restore fatigue without having to create fire.

EDIT: Uphill and Downhill appear to have identical ratios as level surface. I suppose that means I should resist the urge to never run uphill.

[elloco999]

Interesting... I would have thought that sprinting would consume more calories for the same distance.

But when deciding whether to always run or not (especially up/ down a hill) another factor should be considered: the increased chance to sprain a wrist or ankle when running. Also you can pay better attention to your surroundings if you walk, possibly avoiding bad situations for instance by spotting a wolf before it spots you.

[diffeq]

Good points. After further playing I have come to the realization that long distance sprinting is only viable with coffee.

[Patrick Carlson]

It's true, sprinting can bring different problems with it outside of energy usage -- awareness for example as elleco999 points out. To follow up @diffeq, you had the Badge already when you were testing this?

[Pharose]

I have a small suggestion/request. Use F8 to take a debug screenshot at the two points you ran between and these screenshots will give you the coordinates of those two locations. With that info somebody should be able to tell what the actual distance is between these two points and we can then calculate the walking and sprinting speed (in case it hasn't been done already). 

[diffeq]

Hi @Patrick Carlson. Yes, I did have the Free Runner badge during testing.