If someone told you they were making a butter run, you’d probably picture a quick jaunt to the store, when they are short a stick in the middle of a batch of cookies.
That’s not what Libby Cope and boyfriend Jacob Arnold meant.
The couple recently tried something of a mad science experiment during a trail run in the Oregon forest, and the results are churning up some serious chatter online.
“We had some heavy cream and (Jacob) was wondering, ‘If I shake this, I wonder if it’ll make butter.’ That led to, ‘I wonder if I run with this in my backpack, if it’ll make butter.’”
The video now has over 2 million views on TikTok and 11 million on Instagram.
The couple just poured some heavy cream and a little salt into two layers of zip-top bags and placed them in their lightweight running backpacks before hitting the trail. They checked after a couple of miles, but it wasn’t ready yet. “We’re gonna keep on churnin’ and burnin’!” Cope laughs.
After about six miles, their butter had fully separated.
It might seem like a giant leap, but Cope explained to TODAY.com they often run with a trail vest carrying their water and are familiar with that heavy sloshing as they go up and down some pretty rough terrain. It just seemed like a similar, but hilarious, thing to do.
Their second attempt went more smoothly than their first, Cope remembers, because they came prepared with parchment to help shape their bounty, as well as a camp stove to boil up some pasta. They also tried adding flavorings — honey in one and garlic in the other. They wondered if the warmer weather helped as well; a combination of 55-degree sun and a little body heat from the run might have put their makeshift backpacks closer to the ideal butter-making temperature of 60-65 degrees.
Most of the comments on Cope’s posts are positive despite the unconventional method of dairy processing.
“This is why god invented free will and TikTok,” commented one person.
“Im not using my habit stacking abilities well enough,” wrote another.
Workout tracking app Strava even joked about adding a cheeky achievement for butter run devotees: “Brb, gotta tell the dev team we need a new activity tag…”
There are some haters, too, especially where it’s been reposted to other accounts.
“Humanity is doomed,” laments one comment on the Runner’s World post about the experiment. Others worry that this is an inadvisable marketing ploy to sell it to unsuspecting butter lovers.
Cope takes it all in stride, but she wants to assure people that this was meant to be all in good humor, not dubious nutrition advice or a sales pitch. As an outdoorsy content creator, Cope loves encouraging people to have fun with their outside time, whether they’re looking to milk-maid their way up and down the hills or not.
“Some people took it literally, but it’s just fun for fun,” says Cope, “We’ve eaten quite a bit of it, but the goal wasn’t even to eat the butter. It was literally just the science.”
She also wants to make sure everyone knows they sanitized their hands before finalizing their butter-shaping by hand and smearing some on a piece of bread.
Fresh off this runaway success, will Cope be hopping down the butter trail more often?
“It’s been so fun to see people getting outside and running and making butter. That’s what my page is for,” she says. “But I don’t think this is a bit that I’m going to carry on.”
She and Arnold have already moved on to homemade sourdough.
Still, this idea is just crazy enough to spark more interest. You know, for science!
TikTok tells TODAY.com that U.S. posts using #running have increased by over 15% in the last two weeks, and there is a growing cohort of copycats. Posters from Korea to Australia have tried it out, and Cope heard from a commenter who saw a whole group making butter at a local 5K race.
It’s not all smooth churning, though: TikToker Jonny Arnott found his first try at a butter run didn’t pan out. When commenters explained his local weather was too cold for effective butter clumping, he turned a problem into a solution and spiked his next carton of heavy cream with sugar before packing ice cubes around it.
Anyone else up for an ice cream run?
