The Final Boss
For the past 2½ years, Zwift has done a great job motivating me to ride the indoor trainer. While the social aspect has been rewarding, one of my biggest motivators has been chasing in-game achievements: what the industry terms “gamification”.
But a problem arises when users have been around long enough to check off every achievement, and I started reaching that point about a year ago. At the pandemic’s onset, I was already sitting at Level 37, and there were only two interesting things left for me to unlock: a Mondrian-themed in-game jersey at Level 42, and an excellent time trial bike and wheelset at Level 45.
The long-awaited Level 50 achievement!
Riding thru the Tour of Watopia archway
Sporting my new Level 50 rider kit
List of Tour of Watopia stages ridden
After that, the only achievement left to chase was getting to Level 50: the highest experience level in the game. Higher levels require more XP to advance - and commensurately more time - so I could only level up once every 5 to 10 weeks. So at that point, I knew I was still more than year away from Level 50.
With Level 50 being so far away, my biggest question was whether I could get there before Zwift decided to introduce more experience levels. Shortly after I had begun Zwifting, they increased the top level from Level 25 to 50, and 18 months later it seemed kind of inevitable that they’d add more levels soon. So reaching Level 50 before they moved the goalpost felt like a race against time.
For a while, I followed a not-widely-known strategy to earn 25% more XP than usual. By riding a time trial bike, I was given a +10 XP bonus instead of a power-up each time I passed a banner kite on the road.
On top of that, a recent update introduced a new shortcut between the 360 Bridge and the JWB Bridge, which created a small two-kilometer loop around the Italian village. That became the new shortest route between banner kites, allowing a rider on a TT bike to earn 50 XP every 2 KM, rather than the usual 40 XP. That may not sound significant, but when every level requires 20,000 XP, that 25% bonus will save over 120 miles of riding per level! So even though countless little 2 KM circuits got pretty tedious, I eagerly exploited that advantage.
But this past month was even more productive than that... and commensurately more tiring. Zwift’s Tour of Watopia, which always offers an irresistible double XP on every ride, ran from March 29 to April 29. So instead of 20 or even my crafty 25 XP, all “ToW” rides earned a bloated 40 XP per kilometer! It was the ideal opportunity to finish off my quest to reach Level 50.
In the end, I rode 28 out of the tour’s 32 days, only taking one day off due to an emergency room visit for heart palpitations; a two-day break for a followup visit to my doctor and my first Covid shot; and a rest day to celebrate after I hit Level 50.
Although the Tour of Watopia is usually comprised of 5-7 stages, back in 2019 I rode multiple times - 23 stages, in total! - to quickly leap from Level 20 to 26; and last year I managed 16 stages, advancing from Level 35 to 37. But this year I completed a record-shattering 42 stages! That was just enough to earn the 50,000 experience points I needed to tick off my final 2½ levels.
For the record, that was one ride of Stages 1B, 2A, and 5B; twice each for Stage 4A and 5A; three rides of Stage 3A and 4B; Stage 3B (Ocean Lava Cliffside Loop) four times; Stage 2B (Volcano Climb) six times; and Stage 1A (Magnificent 8) a whopping 19 times!
I tripped 500,000 XP on April 27th. After more than a year of working on that goal, I had finally reached Level 50: the non plus ultra of Zwifting. I’d been Zwifting for 2.4 years, and had racked up 11,000 miles over 610 hours of indoor riding, burning 306,000 kcalories (about 90 pounds of body weight), or 1,075 pizza slices according to Zwift). That also included 616,000 feet of ascending, and twelve indoor “Zenturies” plus one 7½-hour 200k ride.
Never let it be said I lack determination, fortitude, or self-discipline.
From this point forward, the orange UI progress bar that shows how far I am through the current level becomes a worthless, unmoving waste of screen real estate. Amusingly, just last week Zwift introduced the ability to hide all UI display components except the riders and the landscape of Zwift’s worlds; I’ll probably make use of that, rather than let myself be discouraged by a perpetually unchanging grey progress bar!
It’s nice that the Tour of Watopia - with its double XP bonus as a motivator - takes place in early spring, when I’m topping up my fitness before transitioning to outdoor riding. After a strong indoor training season that included this year’s Tour de Zwift and Haute Route Watopia events, on the seventh day of the Tour of Watopia I surpassed my previous lifetime fitness record of 98.18 CTL, set last year.
Two weeks later, on my 30th ToW stage, I finally surpassed a CTL of 100, and maxed out at a new record 103.97 a week later, on my Level 50 ride. While a fitness value over 100 doesn’t have any special meaning - other than forcing me to change the scale on all my fitness tracking charts! - it’s still a big, round number that I’d never attained before, and thus worth celebrating. For me, it’s perhaps even more meaningful than reaching Level 50.
There’s a ton of satisfaction in achieving these milestones, but there’s also happiness and relief that all the extra effort and focus of the past year - and especially this past month’s Tour of Watopia - is over!
And more importantly, it’s well past time for my outdoor riding season to begin. I’m sure I’ll be very thankful for the fitness I built up as a result of all this Zwift-inspired off-season training.
After spending so many hours on the indoor trainer getting to Level 50, it feels strange not to be working toward any Zwift achievements. Will I still have the same desire and motivation to ride Zwift when there’s nothing particular to ride for?
With the outdoor season upon us, I happily won’t need to worry about that until next winter. And I still expect Zwift to release another set of advanced levels any day now. My top-level status will have to be reasserted whenever Zwift decides to expand the parameters of the game. After all, it’s in their interest (as well as my own) that they continue to offer new carrots for experienced riders like me to chase.
And I expect they’ll provide me with an opportunity to do that very soon, because rumors have recently resurfaced about Zwift unveiling an Olympics-related Japan course. That could be absolutely stunning, and trigger another series of rides to reassert my longstanding “route hero” status.
But in the meantime, I’m finally taking my partially-vaccinated body and my hard-won fitness outside to enjoy some long, warm summer rides!