Now I hike every weekend, at least 10 miles, which lets me go out with family and friends. I also do various martial arts with my son, which as a shared activity is so much more enjoyable.
The only time I'll run again is if I'm being chased.
But then Canadian winters intervened and I got out of the habit and never got back to it again. Since then I’ve had a pretty bad ankle injury (at work, not from working out) and I miss running so much!
These days, I can barely walk for three days after playing basketball or running, but weight lifting still works.
Anyway, all I can say is that running always made me feel much worse than the short sprints and jumps in basketball, whatever the precise reason may be.
Like the beginning of your comment, it ultimately comes down to gear. An ankle injury is a good reason to not push yourself running, but the weather need not be :)
That's the last bit of winter gear I think I needed. There's something about it though that I love. I can't force myself to get to the gym a block away but I'll go outside in blizzard conditions and really enjoy myself!
Now imagine doing that but instead of being limited by how far you can hike in the time, you can go further because you're running.
> I take my son, my nephew, and friends. We go to the pub afterwards.
Now imagine that even though it's an after work thing and maybe in the dark, you meet up with some friends and talk while you're running.
But once I learned how to run, calibrated my expectation on how running looks like (I was trying way too hard before) and got my body couple months to adjust I started genuinely loving it even though initially I was forcing myself to do it for health reasons.
I think running is something that you can stick to for long enough to be able to figure out if it is actually for you.
What I do now is go cycling/spinning for 30 mins at the gym with an audiobook, it feels like the same proper cardio, but everything else is different, I'm not outside, I don't have to watch out for anything, it's warm, by bones don't feel like they're all getting shaken about.