It's tautological if you phrase it that way. Hiking is just fun. Like, actually fun. If you set up the mental barrier that exercise is bad and sucks and feels

It's tautological if you phrase it that way. Hiking is just fun. Like, actually fun. If you set up the mental barrier that exercise is bad and sucks and feels bad, then sure, now it's bad. If you're super unfit it might suck, much like sitting down and bashing out some cool scripts in Python would suck if you had no programming knowledge, but that's fixable for most.