That's where the second sentence comes in ("If you mean the cutscene, he definitely wasn't running.")-- you can sprint in gameplay, but the Chief hardly ever runs in cutscenes.

: Since crappy writing.

Since the dawn of history, there has been bad writing.

: "You expect me to outrun a slipspace rupture and a localized
: earthquake?"
: "No, Master Chief. I expect you to die."

pretty much, yeah

: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again
: and expecting different results"
: I'm not saying that the Didact himself should have gone onto the field, I'm
: saying that it's ridiculous to think that the Didact was trying to stop
: the Chief with Promethean Knights, because they were scarcely an obstacle.

That kind of depends how you look at it. In gameplay people died because of them a lot. Canonically, sure, he survived all of them, but who can say how narrowly? How can we know, especially with varying difficulties, how difficult it was for the Chief, and how many close calls there were or might have been? side note or question, is Heroic still the "most canonical" difficulty?

: There were other ways he tried to stop us, but it barely registered on the
: radar. Like when he dropped that bridge out from in front of us. It hardly
: even forced us to detour!

Yeah that was weak. I have a feeling though that 343i did that more and people yelled at them after falling to their deaths, so they scaled it back until it was almost gone to keep that section fun (or fun enough). That might be another gameplay/cannon split.