Lucianotes: The Dilemma – To Update, Or Not To Update?

Tuesday is Zwift Racing League day. But also, every few weeks, it’s the day Zwift chooses to release an update of its app. And that is exactly what happened last week. 

It places you in an unsolvable dilemma between your body asking frantically to have the latest features of the app, versus your brain reminding you that on more than one occasion there were unstable updates that left you crying after a mid-race app crash.

You also remember all the myths and legends running around the forums and Facebook pages where your mates have had Close Encounters of the Third Kind type of experiences:

• Middle of the race the pack turns right and… you turn left by yourself.
• Everybody disappears. So, in one way it’s good because you are kind of owner of Watopia… but in a race that ruins your week more than the last episode of Game of Thrones (only joking, of course – there is nothing I can imagine more deceiving than that last episode).
• You can no longer connect your HRM or your smart trainer, and you need to show the patience of a Shaolin monk in order to overcome the steps required to get everything back in order. 
• Your avatar starts to erratically go right and left at the speed of light and disappears within the dinosaurs of the jungle.
• The app language changes to Aramean Hieroglyphics.
• Your avatar punches the guy next to you out of envy, you steal his Tron Bike and escape at 7w/kg while the Zwift police patrol pursues you (my apologies, I may have spent too many hours playing Grand Theft Auto during my teenage years).

Chances are all those issues had nothing to do with the update but with a random bug. However, you can’t help thinking that there is a higher frequency of bugs on update days. 

So you are left with an existential decision to make: to update or not to update? 

An image of your Zwift mentor, the guy you took advice from since day one, pops up in your head, Star Wars Yoda like, and says: “Update you must not, learn patience you must.”

At the exact same time, Scotty (the Zwift Squirrel) appears and whispers to you “You know you have it inside you, deep in your heart you are an early adopter and you want to update! Join me within the latest version of Zwift!”

The intellectual struggle becomes unbearable. You always thought you were a Luke Skywalker and now you are discovering you might be an Anakin/Darth Vader wannabe and the Dark Side is in your blood. Noooo! Zwift is the Dark Side of the force!

Separated from your body, you are now floating in the room. You see your finger slowly approach the pad of the remote control (I am on AppleTV) and select “update”. You are one click away from taking the red pill and bang, you do it. You have not felt so rebellious since the day, back in 2013, where you did not take your morning vitamins, on purpose!

And you immediately regret it. OMG, what have I just done! All my data is going to be wiped for sure! There’s no way to roll back to the previous version! My anxiolytics expenditure is going to skyrocket!

Ten minutes before the start of the race, while in the pen, you are sweating without even pedaling. You track any detail on the screen which would indicate an instability announcing the collapse of mankind.  The race starts and everything seems to work properly: you are doing as bad as usual. The race finishes, you save your session, it uploads to Strava, to Garmin, to Training Peaks, to Tik Tok, to Snapchat. All is perfect. 

You’ve survived DEFCON one. And in some way, you kind of saved the world by exposing yourself to the update first. Except that Zwift’s Facebook page is inexplicably full of comments from people experiencing Close Encounter situations which are for sure the consequence of the app update…

And it will all happen again next month.