I have run into an issue with my newest character. I am playing a pure mage, completely disdaining all armor. From the start of the game, I noticed that I ran at the expected quick speed of a player character with no armor on.

Suddenly earlier today, my character started running at light-armor no-perk speeds. That is, instead of running at unarmored speeds, he's running at the speed of a player wearing light armor.

My character is not diseased and has no armor on.

What's up with my run speed slowing down?

Wearing one of the lich masks?

No and I've tried it naked too. I reloaded an older save, and it has the faster run speed.

Now that I've been playing with the problem, I've noticed something. It shifts. The speed shifts, even on the same terrain. Now that I've compared speeds, what it's really like is having your weapon drawn. I basically am running at the speed of unarmored + weapon drawn, even when I don't have anything drawn (including spells).

There were all kinds of crappy bugs like this in Oblivion, but the athletics skill covered them up.

Is there a console command to set character run speed? I don't mind "cheating" to cover up a bug.

Try
player.setav speedmult 100

or

player.forceav speedmult 100

After exiting the console, press ALT (or equiv) to sprint and when you return to running speed, it will update.

I had exactly the same problem as you, this fixes it everytime.

Good luck
Wiley

My first characters started out with what seemed like 2x run speed. After a few days of tweaking (None that worked) and verifying the game cache it went back to a normal speed. Just fired the game up today and now I seem to be running in almost slow motion. All of these characters are mages with no armour. My guess would be that something is bugged for sure.

Thank you for the help! Is there a difference between the set and force options?

I think force is the command in the case that whatever is effecting your speed can only be overridden with forceav. Just a guess.

I had a similar problem. At one point my speed slowed to a crawl -- when I was running it was like I walking in molasses. This started in the middle of a melee being fought in shallow water (the Swindler's Den quest to kill Kematu). I know I used my first level Unrelenting Force shout several times, if that has any relevance. Finally I did a Save, exited the game, and restarted at the same save, and the problem disappeared. What a huge relief!

I'm now noticing a lot of correlation between slowdowns and dragon fights.

Forceav seems to work every time to fix it.