When you hit an entity for the first time during a sprint, the game will begin to treat you as if you are walking, despite still sprinting. This persists until you stop sprinting and sprint again. This causes several things to stop functioning correctly.

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Start sprinting. (You must hold down the sprint key, or press it once if you use toggle sprint. If you hit an entity while the sprint key isn't being held down with hold sprint enabled, it will stop your sprint, preventing the bug from occurring.)
2. Hit an entity while your attack strength is greater than at least 84.8% (you must trigger a knockback attack, weak hits won't work).
3. Continue to sprint without stopping and observe the results.

Observed Results:

The game treats you as if you are walking, even though you are still sprinting. As a result, several abnormal side effects can be observed:

-Your hunger bar will decrease significantly slower, as if you were walking.

-Critical hits can be performed, even though you are sprinting and not walking.

-Knockback hits can no longer be preformed until you stop and start sprinting again.

-The "sprint_one_cm" statistic stops increasing entirely.

Expected Results:

None of the above quirks should happen, as you are still sprinting.

Screenshots/Videos:

sprint glitch.mp4

Infinite Hunger in Minecraft

Notes:

This bug likely stems from the changes made to sprinting in 1.7, when the sprint button was added. Before 1.7, when you hit an entity while sprinting, the game would automatically stop your sprint, and this still happens in the game in 1.7 and onward. However, due to the sprint button immediately starting the sprint back up again, and due to oversights with its implementation, the game will not acknowledge that the player has started another sprint, resulting in the game incorrectly treating the player as walking.

It comes without saying that the exploit involving hunger is incredibly broken when traveling long distances on foot, since you can move at sprinting speeds with only the walking penalties applied, thereby increasing the distance you can travel without needing to eat tenfold.

As for combat, needing to reset your sprint over and over just to perform consistent knockback hits is clunky and unintuitive. This bug is what ultimately led to the W-tapping/sprint resetting tech existing within the PvP community, starting with 1.7, and it still exists within the game today, even after 1.9.