Maybe you haven't found the right exercise? I'd rather stick needles under my fingernails than go for a jog, but happily spend 90 mins+ 4 times a week strength training.
Or maybe a sport might be more fun? Tennis, ulimate frisbee etc.
Or maybe a sport might be more fun? Tennis, ulimate frisbee etc.
The point I'm making is that exercise is not fun for me, and while I appreciate the effort, attempts to persuade me otherwise are doomed to failure. (The endless, banal music the gym played didn't help.) What was worse was that there was no objective way to measure progress so I didn't even know if it was doing anything.
(That said, I do enjoy hill walking (== hiking), but that's even more of a time sink and not something I can do on a daily basis. It's also strictly low-output aerobic.)
I agree that not being able to measure progress is horribly demotivating. But I find the opposite, that exercise is one of the few areas in my life where I can objectively measure progress. For example:
Body weight
Resting heart rate
5k run time
Longest distance run without stopping
Max weight / number of repetitions / duration for strength exercises
Being told that I need six months' work before anything measurable happens is not really something I find motivating!
For me when I started exercising seriously I started noticing I was consistently beating my personal bests [1] after about 2 weeks. It doesn't take 6 months. I even started feeling great from the cardio on Day 1.
[1] Running times over a set distance, and amount of pushups/pullups/situps in a row. If I actually recovered properly it would probably take even less time to beat the initial records.