The Family Vacation is a great way to challenge yourself as a daughter, girlfriend, and human being.
This six-week plan will help you build towards your ten-day trip to London with nine family members in tow, using a variety of exercises designed to prepare your body, mind, and last nerve.
We know this upcoming trip isn’t the only thing you’ve got going on, so the Family Vacation Training Plan is uniquely flexible for your busy life. And your Aunt DeeDee is coming, then not coming, then coming, then not coming.
Schedule
Vacation days are long, and you need to adjust your schedule gradually. Each week of training, set your alarm fifteen minutes earlier, and wait thirty extra minutes each day to eat. Make sure you add in at least twenty minutes of sitting around, wondering what’s going on. You’ll be ready when your mom takes forty-five minutes to “go up to the room real quick and grab a light jacket before we go get food.”
Nutrition
Your family trip will consist of three primary food groups: dairy-carbs, shellfish, and gin. By week six, you should be eating cheesy bread, shrimp cocktail, and espresso martinis for all nine meals: breakfast, pastry stop, early lunch so your uncle shuts up, regular lunch, third lunch at the brewery Dad found, fried cheese happy hour, fried oyster happy hour, bread dinner, and gelato.
Strength
You’ll want to incorporate strength exercises into your routine to simulate the following:
- Lifting eight “carry-on” suitcases into an overhead bin
- Holding your mom’s ten-gallon water bottle
- Carrying a chicken-shaped vase across town back to the hotel
- Lifting the rental bike off your uncle
- Helping carry your uncle to the nearest urgent care
- Plugging your ears while your aunt blames “socialism” for your uncle falling off his rental bike
Endurance
Each day you’ll visit more and more museums, and each museum will have fewer benches and a more mundane history than the last. We recommend one endurance session per week: Stand in your living room and try to read Oliver Cromwell’s Wikipedia page while your training partner peppers you with questions like, “Are you thinking of having children?”
Cardio
Each day until the trip, walk at least two miles in the wrong direction.
Have Fun
Just remember, your Family Vacation isn’t a race; it’s a celebration of all the hard work you’ve put in. All the group texts, the individual texts, the group emails, the individual emails, the phone calls, the emails recapping the phone calls, and the screenshots of the other text convos that you are confused why you weren’t in.
But don’t forget to have fun. And don’t forget to tell your mom not to say “Zohran Mamdani” around Aunt DeeDee.
