People are churning butter on runs. We're sorry to be the ones to tell you this

Listen, we don't control the internet. Nor do we have any say in how people exercise their free will.

So please, don't blame us if we're the first to tell you that runners have discovered they can churn butter by strapping bags of heavy cream and salt to their torsos and running around for an hour.

They're calling it "churning and burning," or more simply, "butter runs." Yes, it does work, and yes, they're eating it at the end.

We'll give you a moment to process this information.

"You may be asking yourself, 'Why?'" Libby Cope, an Oregon-based outdoor and running content creator, says in her viral TikTok video with more than 2.3 million views that jumpstarted the trend.

"The real question is, 'Why not?'" she adds, while pouring a carton of heavy cream into a Ziploc bag and sprinkling sea salt into it.

And that, dear reader, may in fact be the entire crux of the butter run. Because who amongst those of us who take part in the sport of running hasn't, at some point, wondered: What exactly is the point of this?

Sure, maybe we're getting PBs and Strava likes and making sizeable dents in our audiobooks, but at the end of the day, aren't we just all running ... nowhere?

Why not churn butter while you're at it, indeed.

For science, Cope told CBC News in an interview Friday.

"We Googled it and there weren’t any prior runners, to our knowledge, that successfully made butter," Cope said.

"So we were like … OK, so we’d maybe be the first?" 

In her first butter run video posted Feb. 25, Cope and her boyfriend Jacob Arnold zip bags of cream into their running vests and hit the trails.