It helps if one person knows you are out there
Most of your running will happen with nobody else involved. You go out, you come back, and the only record of it is that you are hungry and your legs feel used. There is a lot to be said for that. It is one of the few things left in a week that nobody is scheduling, managing or waiting on you for.
The trouble turns up later. When the whole thing is private, stopping is also private. Nobody asks. The project can end quietly on a wet Tuesday and the world carries on exactly as it was, which makes stopping very easy indeed.
Solitude is doing real work
The alone part is not a shortcoming waiting to be fixed. Running by yourself buys you a stretch of time where nothing is being asked of you, and where you are with your own thinking for long enough that it rearranges itself a bit. Plenty of people find that the run is where a problem stops being so loud, even if it does not get solved.
You will not get that in a talkative group at somebody else's pace. If the empty road is what draws you to this, keep it. You are not doing a lesser version of the sport by preferring your own company.
What alone stops giving you
Where it thins out is over months. Two things go scarce. The first is the small external pull that gets you out on a day you would rather not: someone standing at the corner at seven does more for your attendance than any amount of resolve does. The second is harder to name. It is simply the experience of another person knowing what you are up to.
You can put in a year of steady, unglamorous effort and have nobody in your life aware that it happened. That is a strange kind of invisible to be. It is also why so much running dies without ceremony. There was nothing holding it in place except your own opinion of yourself on a given morning, and that opinion moves around a great deal.
The group is not an audition
The obvious answer is to run with people. The obvious reason not to is that you will be the slowest one there, and everybody will have to wait, and you will spend an hour apologising with your face. That fear deserves to be taken seriously rather than laughed off, because it is usually the real reason somebody never turns up, and calling it silly has never once dismantled it.
Still, a couple of things are worth knowing before you rule it out. Any group that has been going for a while is used to a spread of paces and has some arrangement for it, whether that is a slower bunch or a route that loops back. And the fastest person in a running club almost never turns out to be the one with any standing in it. That tends to belong to whoever keeps showing up and is kind to the new ones.
If you go, go with full permission never to go again. Some groups will not suit you. Then you have lost an hour and learned something, which is a very small price for the version where it does suit you.
Or tell one person
Groups will never appeal to some people, and there is a much smaller move that does most of the same work. Tell one person what you are doing.
Not an announcement to everyone you know. One friend, a partner, a brother, somebody at work who runs. Say that you are going out a few times a week and that you would like them to ask you about it now and then. That is the entire intervention. It costs you one slightly awkward sentence, and it changes the arithmetic of a Tuesday evening, because now there is a person in the world who might ask how it is going.
Better still if you can find someone at roughly your stage. Run together every other week and alone the rest of the time. You keep the solitude you like and you gain somebody who notices when you go quiet.
Choose it rather than drift into it
Most people never actually decide this. They run alone because alone needed no arranging, and after a year or two they conclude they must be the sort of person who does things alone. That may well be true. It is worth checking, because a solitude you chose feels quite different from one you simply fell into.
So keep the empty road if the empty road is what you want. Tell one person anyway. There is no prize for having got through all of it without help, and being known has never yet made anybody worse at this.
Written to encourage, not to diagnose. If something hurts or feels wrong, please speak to a doctor.