Yesterday during the post-race debrief, one of my teammates mentioned that those owning the Tron bike had a clear advantage over the others in this race.
It reminded me that one of the major quests in Zwift is to get the Tron bike, unlocking when you reach 50,000 meters elevation gain. It reminded me also of my journey to get it.
Spoiler alert: yes it is good looking, but the thing does not even show when you are drafting.
I was progressing regularly towards the 50km goal. I was not asking those who already had the Tron bike any questions because the only question I had was such a silly one I was embarrassed to ask: I hate yellow. I was terrified of the idea that you are automatically assigned a Tron bike of a certain color that you cannot change and mine would be yellow.
27km elevation down the line, during a social ride, a teammate explains on Discord that he is super upset since he reached 50km elevation but the Tron bike did not unlock. That he wrote to Zwift support to get it solved but did not get an answer yet. He was counting on getting the Tron for the following race, what a disgrace…
That’s when another participant to the channel asks him if he has activated the Everest challenge on the menu page.
The guy says what the heck is the Everest challenge?
You need to activate it otherwise the elevation does not count.
Obviously the first guy, at this very same moment, was very close to triggering the Japanese seppuku ritual to end his life while looking at the sunset from the antenna tower on the top of the Watopia Epic KOM.
And you have no choice but to make fun of him. How dumb is he, right? He did not activate the Everest challenge… how dumb, right?
For a second you are just in denial. You try as hard as you can to create a parallel universe, an alternate reality in which four months ago, the first day you joined Zwift, you activated the Everest challenge.
But your neurons are rather efficient at connecting to the fact that you did not…. yes my friend. You did not activate the Everest challenge either. So your hard-earned 27km elevation count for nothing, rien in French, nada in Spanish, zero in the three languages…
Despite the universal truth hitting you back, desperately you run to log on Zwift praying that your niece, one day while trying to launch Netflix on your device, mistakenly entered Zwift and has activated the challenge. For sure it is a possibility. I would even say it is very probable that this occurred. More crazy things have happened to you in life than an 11 year old girl guessing by mistake and in the first attempt your 16-bit encrypted password then activating the one amongst several challenges which would make your 27km count.
This should have also happened metaphysically, in the first sense of the word, meaning without any physical contact, since your niece was confined in her place and you were confined in yours for the last five months.
You login and go to the Everest challenge, it says 0m elevation. The End. Game over.
Your entire life is ruined. Nothing could ever make sense again. You feel the same way you felt the day you forgot your Woody and Buzz Lightyear action figures in the park and never saw them again.
Life will never ever be the same. You curse for three hours and swear you will never ever make a single meter of elevation again.
One week later, in the bottom of your heart, a little sparkle starts to grow into a flame. You never ever surrendered. It will not be the case with the Tron Bike!!! The reputation of your entire family name goes into it!
You log into Zwift, activate the Everest Challenge and a few months and thousand kilometers later BANG!!!!!! Your Tron bike is unlocked.
You immediately open the garage and equip, go back and check which map is most crowded at the moment in order to showcase at least 50,000 others your brand-new Tron bike customized in shining blue. You expect a rain of Ride Ons which will never come. But you don’t care, for a day you are the king of the world.
PS: whenever there is a new guy on Zwift mentioning his quest to get the Tron bike, I make sure I never tell him about the Everest Challenge activation thingy. There is not a single reason in the world why I should have been screwed and others are not. 😜
wpDiscuz
