You are allowed to find out that running is not for you
Nearly everything written about running for beginners, this blog included, assumes the same thing. If it feels bad, keep going. Slow down, be patient, give it time, and it will become yours. For most people in the first couple of months that is the right advice, because almost everything about starting feels bad and very little of it tells you anything.
But there is a quieter group of people that advice does not reach. They have been at it a while. They went slowly, they forgave the missed weeks, they stopped comparing themselves with anyone. And they still dislike it. They dread it beforehand, they count the minutes during, and the relief afterwards is mostly relief that it is over. If that is you, you are allowed to take it seriously.
Hard and wrong feel the same for a while
The trouble is that in the early weeks you cannot tell the two apart. Hard feels like this is not for me. So does wrong. Your legs ache in both cases, you get breathless in both cases, and in both cases a voice at the door says you would rather be doing anything else.
Time is what separates them, and it does so slowly. When something is only hard, the dread tends to loosen a little at a time. The deciding gets quicker. You notice, some evening, that you are halfway out the door before the argument has properly started. When something is wrong for you, the effort may get easier and the dislike stays exactly where it was. You get fitter and you still do not want to go. That is worth noticing, and it is not a character flaw.
Give it a fair trial before you decide
A fair trial is longer and gentler than most people give it. A lot of people who are sure they hate running have only ever run too fast, on the same punishing route, at an hour that suited somebody else. That is a test of how much discomfort you can stand, and it would put most people off almost anything.
So before you draw a conclusion, try the kindest version of it for a while: slow enough to talk, short enough that you finish feeling you could have done a bit more, on a route you would happily walk, at a time of day you picked yourself. If the dislike survives all of that, over weeks rather than days, you have learned something real about yourself and running, and it deserves to be treated as information.
Think about what you were after in the first place
Very few people start running because they love running. They start because they want to move more, or feel more at home in their own body, or have one part of the week that belongs to them. Running is a cheap and convenient way to get those things. It is one way among several.
If you find that the thing you actually wanted comes more easily on a bike, in a pool, on a long walk with the dog, or in a room full of people doing the same class, then you have kept the goal and changed the route to it. The person who swaps running for swimming and keeps swimming is in a far better place than the person who forces three more miserable months of running and then stops moving altogether.
If you stop, stop on purpose
What matters most is how you leave. Drifting away from running tends to leave a residue. It gets filed alongside every other thing you started and did not finish, and it becomes one more piece of evidence for a story about yourself that is mostly untrue. That story is what makes starting the next thing harder.
Choosing to stop is different. It sounds like this: I gave it a proper go, I learned that it is not mine, and I am going to try something else next week. Say that to yourself plainly, and then actually go and try the something else, so the decision has somewhere to land.
You also get to keep what you learned while you were doing it. You found out you can go out when you do not feel like it, and that you can be bad at something in public and come home fine. None of that belonged to running. It comes with you into whatever you do next.
And running will still be there. Plenty of people come back to it years later, for different reasons, and find it fits in a way it did not before. Nobody is keeping a record of the time you set it down.
Written to encourage, not to diagnose. If something hurts or feels wrong, please speak to a doctor.