Sunshine and Rainbows?

Hello! Welcome back to Footprint. Happy Friday.

🏈 Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show included hundreds of performers dressed as sugarcane. One of them, Austin Klapman, logged his walk onto the field on Strava – and received a place in November’s New York City Marathon after it went viral.

The next few editions of Footprint will look a bit different, with more of a rundown of interesting news and stories from across the sport, as I head to Australia for a little while.

✉ As always, let me know what you think: email me, or hit ‘reply’, with feedback, ideas, and Sydney running tips.

Training app Runna has introduced changes including options to slow down running plans after some users claimed the platform pushed them to injuries.

As more runners choose cheaper, digital training plans over human coaches, more reports of issues and frustrations are surfacing on social media.

“I’m obviously incredibly sorry to hear that anyone gets injured,” Josh Oppenheim, Runna’s chief operating officer, told The Wall Street Journal. “Running is a high-impact sport by definition, and there are injuries that happen. That being said, we are still improving the product.”

Runna, which was bought by the fitness app Strava last year, recently revised its beginner plans. They now include slow and steady default settings, following criticism that its plans were too arduous.

“While Runna’s plans are getting smarter, your most valuable training tool remains listening to your body and knowing when to hit pause,” Nicole Nguyen writes in the Journal.

A pace of 5:16 per mile is impressive enough, without adding skis and a steep climb into the mix.

That’s how fast Norway’s Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo is estimated to have run during the men’s cross-country sprint classic at the Winter Olympics earlier this week.

A few ski lengths ahead of USA’s Ben Ogden and Norway’s Oskar Opstad Vike, Dan Beck reports for Runner’s World that Klaebo accelerated on an uphill – and hit a reported top speed of 11.4mph.

Juan López García first ran a mile sixteen years ago, aged 66. Now 82, he holds the world record for the 50km ultramarathon in the 80-to-84 age group.

Gretchen Reynolds reports in The Washington Post on efforts by scientists to examine just how he was able to run for longer, and faster, as he grew older. “That’s not… usual,” Julian Alcazar, co-author of a study on López García, told her.

The study found his VO2 max, the standard gauge of aerobic fitness, to be the highest recorded in octogenarians, at least to its authors’ knowledge – roughly matching that of a healthy man in his twenties.

While López García reached his sixties without serious illness or disabilities, the scientists also pointed to the fact he remained active as he grew older. “I’m 35,” Alcazar told the Post. “I’m thinking about how to age well. Having seen him, of course I exercise.”

Does running actually burn calories? Evolutionary anthropologist Herman Pontzer has, for years, laid out a novel theory: that when we burn calories through exercise, our bodies figure out how to save them in different ways.

He recently published a new paper on the current evidence.

“The strongest version of Pontzer’s claim is that when you burn 100 calories exercising, your body finds a way of saving 100 calories,” Alex Hutchinson writes in his latest Sweat Science column for Outside. Not everyone is convinced.

While some compensation probably occurs, Hutchinson adds, after scrutinizing the data, “under normal conditions without dietary restriction, it only claws back a fraction of the calories you burn.”

Two-time Olympic champion Jakob Ingebrigtsen had surgery on his achilles after a fresh flare-up, leaving him out of action for the next few months.

“Running is not always sunshine and rainbows,” he wrote on social media, “but injuries are part of the sport and setbacks are a part of life.”

Channeling Michael Scott’s impression of the Terminator, Ingebrigtsen added: “I’ll be back!”

Jamil Coury wasn’t happy. A few days into January, it became clear fast food chain Chipotle had axed its popular collaboration with Strava, through which runners compete to win burritos and bowls by running certain segments around the world.

“I’ve been looking forward to this for many months,” the ultra runner said in a video on Instagram. “The question is: what do we do now?”

He did something about it. “We are putting together our own grassroots challenge,” Coury announced on January 5. It quickly found a hungry audience.

By the end of the month, the Burrito League had expanded into 115 chapters worldwide. More than 17,000 athletes collectively completed 677,311 segments on Strava – about 176,415 miles, in total.