There is no correct hour to run
Spend any time reading about running and you come away with the impression that there is a correct hour for it, and that the hour is early. Before work. Before the house is awake. Before the day has had a chance to take it off you. It is rarely offered as a preference. It arrives with the tone of a rule, and if your mornings are already spoken for, or if your body flatly refuses to cooperate before nine, you begin with the quiet sense that you are doing this wrong before you have done anything at all.
The morning has better press than it deserves
There are honest reasons people run early. Very little has had the chance to go wrong yet. Nobody has asked you for anything. The run is finished before the day starts making its claims on you, which is a real advantage and explains why so many people who run a lot eventually drift to that hour.
None of that makes the hour itself virtuous. Somewhere the early start stopped being a scheduling decision and became a character reference. Getting up at five reads as discipline. Going out at nine in the evening reads as what was left over. The body doing the work has no opinion on the matter. It responds to the effort you give it and it has no idea what the clock says.
Most people do not choose their hour
For nearly everyone, the hour is not selected from a menu. It is whatever survives the job, the commute, the children, the light, the heat, and the number of hours you actually slept. You are not picking a time so much as finding the gap that nothing else has already claimed.
Then there is you. Some people are genuinely useless first thing and steady by the evening. Others fall apart after six and are at their best before breakfast. That is not a discipline setting you can adjust by wanting it harder. If you have set an early alarm eight weeks running and gone out twice, the honest reading is not that you lack character. It is that the hour does not fit your life, and you have now spent two months collecting evidence to that effect.
Pick the hour with the fewest ways to fail
A more useful question than when you would ideally run is which hour of your week has the least competition. Every slot has its own way of collapsing. Evenings go down to a late meeting or a phone call at six. Lunchtimes go down to whatever gets scheduled over them. Early mornings go down to a bad night with a child or a deadline that kept you up past midnight.
Look at the last month and you can usually see which hour held and which one kept getting taken. Build on the one that held, even if it is not the one you would choose in a tidier life. Getting out of the door reliably has far more to do with how few obstacles stand between you and the pavement than with how determined you felt when you made the plan.
Then make that hour as easy to keep as you can. Have the kit somewhere you will fall over it. Decide the route in advance so you are not standing in the hallway negotiating. The fewer decisions left at the moment of departure, the more often you leave.
You are allowed to change it
The hour that worked all summer often stops working in November, when it is dark at half four and cold at both ends of the day. Jobs change. Children change. A slot that fitted beautifully in one season simply stops existing in the next.
People tend to read that as the habit breaking. Usually the habit is fine and only the slot has expired. If you moved your running to a different part of the day and kept running, nothing has gone wrong. You adjusted, which is the whole skill, and it is worth noticing that you did rather than treating the change as evidence of decline.
What is worth putting down is the idea that you should have been a morning runner. It costs you something to carry, and it earns nothing back. Every run you do at the hour you can actually manage counts exactly as much as the same run done at dawn by someone whose life allows for dawn.
A year from now, nobody looking at what your running gave you will be able to tell what time of day you did it.
Written to encourage, not to diagnose. If something hurts or feels wrong, please speak to a doctor.