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Bagricula comments on The True Rejection Challenge - Less Wrong
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I do not exercise.
(Caveat: I will refrain from taking any advice that would lead to me starting to significantly exercise until I have a diagnosis and a treatment plan of my apparent heart condition, which doesn't indicate it would be unsafe or otherwise a medically bad idea. I'd be really surprised if my doctor told me not to exercise, but in case she does I want to wait and make sure that my body is really lying to me when it says "don't do that, bad things will happen".)
Reasons (and existing known routes around each):
Sweat is horrible, and I overheat too easily. (Swimming gets around these; outdoor exercise in cold weather, interestingly, does not.)
Sunshine is horrible (and other environmental issues). (Anything indoors or at night gets around the sunshine thing. Other environmental issues are mostly limited to smelly gyms and excessively humid indoor pool facilities. Anything outdoors and at night and in nice weather gets around this.)
Many forms of it are financially costly (equipment, facility use). (Going for walks does not have this problem.)
It is boring. (When I tried jujitsu, it did not have this particular problem. Merely being able to listen to music does not solve this, although it could combine with another partial solution. If this problem is solved by simultaneously watching a movie, it has to be in a context where I can turn on subtitles, because I will not be able to reliably hear dialogue over any non-perfectly-silent form of exercise.)
Known route around all of these problems: happening to have free access to an outdoor pool which is open at night and a person who will go with me and chat while we both backstroke laps. This would be great but I don't happen to have access to a free outdoor pool that is open in the dark.
Dance in the shower?
Even fairly restrained dancing over an extended period can elevate your heart-rate and trigger many of the benefits of exercise.
If you have a shower and live in an area where cold water is provided for free, then there is no cost. Additionally, this should address your sweat issue much like swimming in a pool.
It is indoors which eliminates sunlight.
Vis-a-vie the boredom constraint. Dancing to music by itself may be a varied enough activity to keep you mentally engaged. If this is insufficient you might consider audiobooks or talk radio.
Complications:
Safety. If you dance too vigorously then you may slip or injure yourself. You will know better whether this is a very likely issue. If it is, you may be able to mitigate with protective clothing (either purchased such as no slip water-shoes/socks or made from household objects; feasibility depending on your particular budget constraint and safety concerns).
You may not have a sufficiently strong set of external speakers to overcome the noise of the shower. If so, you might mitigate by (1) reducing the water flow for your shower, (2) purchasing or building louder speaks (for example, build a cone out of cardboard to amplify and direct the volume.)
Just cold water may be too cold for you. To mitigate either (1) add hot water (and possible add cost), (2) exercise outside the shower first to raise your body temperature, (3) acclimate yourself to colder water (this has been done by many people in the past either by necessity or due to a specific purpose such as Channel swimming).
I doubt I could hear anything with content over the shower itself no matter how good my speakers were, and I have pretty terrible balance in general. (I rarely actually fall, but I have to touch walls a lot to make that not happen.)
Run the experiment:
For entertainment - try different levels of water flow with your existing speaker setup and see if there's any overlap between the range of "audible entertainment" and "acceptable cooling." The experiment is fast and cheap. Edit: You may not be able to find the right level of cooling without first doing some exercise nearby to heat yourself up.
For safety - Assuming you've found an optimal level of water flow, try dancing at various levels of intensity with a friend present in the bathroom to catch-you/call-an-ambulance/help in case of severe accident. Not quite as fast as the first experiment, but contingent on it and still free and relatively easy - plus amusing for a friend
Dancing in the shower with someone to catch me? Okay, to be fair, I didn't mention modesty issues in my original post, but I didn't really think anybody was going to suggest something that involved immodesty...
(The shower curtain in my home is transparent.)
Ha. Here you go just piling on additional constraints!
Could you wear a bathing suit that'd provide sufficient modesty?
I could indeed do that. Hmm. (Not sure if Ade wants to watch me dance in the shower, though.)