You told someone you had started, and then you stopped
Somewhere near the start you told somebody. It might have been deliberate, because saying a thing out loud makes it harder to drop quietly. It might have slipped out when someone asked what you had been up to lately. Either way it is said now, and it exists with at least one other person.
Then a few weeks went by in which you did not go out, and the telling turned into something you are carrying around.
The version you are running in your head
You picture a quiet account being kept. The person who asked remembers the conversation and does the arithmetic every time they see you. When running comes up in a room you can feel the subject moving in your direction, and you have the answer ready before anyone has asked for it. Work has been relentless. The evenings got dark. You will get back to it properly after this month.
You start swerving small things too. You leave out the weekend walk in case it invites the question. You stop reading anything to do with running, because it brings the gap back into view: what you said, and what has happened since.
What the other person actually did with it
Almost nothing. People have very little room for anybody else's projects, and that is capacity rather than coldness. They heard you, they thought good for you, and then they went back to the week they were already having. If you asked them today whether you still run, most of them would not be sure either way. The ones who do remember have it filed as something you do sometimes, which is not a status they are awaiting an update on.
The ledger you are worried about exists in one place and you are the one keeping it. Nobody else has the figures. Plenty of the people you told have something of their own sitting in exactly the same condition, half begun and quietly unmentioned, and they are not giving yours a second thought.
Why saying it helped, and then stopped helping
The announcement did real work at the time. It took a private intention and made it a fact in the world, and for a week or two that got you out on evenings you would otherwise have let go. That effect is genuine, and it is why the advice to tell somebody gets handed out so freely.
The problem is what it borrows against. It puts your standing with another person behind the habit, so the first time you stop, going out again picks up a second job. Now it has to clear your name as well as get you round the block. That is a lot of weight to hang on forty minutes, and it is why the restart can feel heavier than the start ever did.
Starting again without an announcement
You do not owe anyone a relaunch. There is no need to tell the colleague you are back at it, nothing to mark, no second declaration at dinner. Go out on your own account and leave everybody else out of it this time. If it lasts, people will notice on their own, and they will not need the history.
If the question does come, the plain answer is the easiest one available. You stopped for a while and you have started going out again. Nobody is owed the reasons. The honest version also tends to close the subject faster than an excuse does, because an excuse invites a follow-up question and the truth does not.
None of this makes the quiet months pleasant to think about. It just means they are weeks, not a debt, and they are spent now whatever you have decided they say about you. You can go out this evening without telling a single person, and it will count exactly as much as the one you announced.
Written to encourage, not to diagnose. If something hurts or feels wrong, please speak to a doctor.