What each rule looks like on the road
| Rule | On vacation | Honest difficulty |
|---|---|---|
| Two 45-min workouts | Walks, bodyweight, hotel stairwell — equipment was never required | Easier than it looks |
| One outdoors | An unfamiliar city at 7am is the best outdoor session you will have | Easy, heat aside |
| Gallon of water | Buy big bottles on arrival day one; hotels and planes will not supply it | Logistics, not willpower |
| 10 pages | Flights are the easiest reading of the whole 75 days | Easy |
| Progress photo | Ten seconds in any bathroom — set a phone alarm, this is the rule people forget abroad | Easy to do, easy to forget |
| Diet, no cheat meals | Restaurant menus three times a day, every day | Hard |
| No alcohol | All-inclusive wristband, toasts, aperitivo hour | This is the one |
Read the right-hand column and the shape of the problem is clear: travel does not threaten the training. It threatens the table. Most attempts that die abroad die at a dinner, not in a gym.
The flight day, solved
The day people fear most is mostly a scheduling exercise:
- Workout one before you leave — even at 6am, even as a 45-minute walk. Never bet the streak on having energy after landing.
- Workout two on arrival: a walk from the hotel is the classic. Deliberate, continuous terminal walking counts too if a delay eats the evening — 45 minutes of it is legal, if bleak.
- Water starts before boarding. Two large bottles after security; cabin service pours 200 ml at a time and a gallon will not happen up there.
- Pages on the plane, photo at the hotel — set the alarm for the photo. Forgetting it after a perfect day is the classic travel restart, and by the rules it counts the same as skipping everything. What happens then is its own decision.
The alcohol decision — make it before you book
By the rules there is nothing to decide: no alcohol, all 75 days, weddings and resorts included. One glass is day one again. So the real decision happens earlier, when the trip and the challenge are both still movable, and it has three honest outcomes:
- Schedule around it. Put the 75 days where the trip is not — the calculator shows exactly what any start date collides with. This is the cleanest answer and the least used.
- Go, and hold the line. Doable, and people do it — order the sparkling water first so the glass is full when toasts happen. Decide before the trip, out loud, because deciding at the table has a known outcome.
- Run 75 Soft instead — where a social occasion is written into the rules rather than broken by them. If the trip matters more than the absolutism, this is not the fallback. It is the correct challenge for the life you actually have, which is the whole argument of the alternatives page.
The quiet third rail: the diet. “Follow your diet exactly, no cheat meals” meets a holiday where every meal is a menu. The survivable version is deciding what your diet means in restaurants before you land — a default order shape, not a food list: protein plus vegetables, skip the bread basket, dessert is not on the diet you wrote. Vague diets do not survive room service. The full logic is on the diet page.
Or: do not take 75 Hard on holiday
Unfashionable and worth saying: a holiday is also a legitimate thing to protect. If the trip is the family's one week of the year, spending it defending a water gallon and photographing yourself in resort bathrooms is a choice — not an obligation. Put the challenge before the trip or after it, and let the week be a week. The challenge measures whether you do what you planned; planning around your actual life is not the loophole. It is the skill.