New Climb and Workout of the Week Challenges Released

Back in May, Zwift introduced a “Route of the Week” challenge, where a different route is featured each week, and completing it earns a 500XP bonus. Learn more here >

Yesterday, two new weekly challenges have launched: a “Workout of the Week” featuring an ERG workout from Zwift’s library and a “Climb of the Week” featuring a climb portal. In simple terms, these work like the Route of the Week: simply complete the featured workout or climb to earn an XP bonus. But let’s take a closer look…

Workout of the Week

Click the Workout of the Week card on your homescreen to see the details of this week’s featured workout. Kicking it off? “Emily’s Short Mix”, a popular OG Zwift workout named after Emily Mullen, an early leader on the Zwift’s marketing team.

Finish the workout (I’m not sure what constitutes “finishing” the workout, as you definitely don’t have to earn all the stars), and you’ll see a banner on your screen:

Once you finish the workout, clicking the homepage card initiates a confetti party and a popup telling how much much bonus XP you earned:

How Much Bonus XP?

Until this week, completing the Route of the Week would earn you a 500XP bonus. But Zwift has changed their XP bonus formula, giving different bonuses based on the difficulty/length of the featured route/workout/climb. On the weekly challenge forum thread, Zwift staffer Alex says, “The XP reward does vary based on the difficulty of the ride, though we’re still fine-tuning the reward for these.”

So Zwift isn’t sharing the exact formula yet, but you can see above that we get a 250XP bonus for the 30-minute Emily’s Short Mix workout, and a 750XP bonus for the longer Tourmalet climb. Alex also says, “We agree that the reward needs to be clear on the UI. We’re looking at some options.”

Climb of the Week

Click the Workout of the Week card on your homescreen to see the details of this week’s featured climb portal. Our first featured climb? The mighty Col du Tourmalet, with 1213 meters of elevation gain across 17.2km of riding.

Finish the climb (yes, finishing it at 50% scaling counts), and you’ll see a banner on your screen:

Once you finish the climb, click the homepage card for a confetti party and a popup telling how much bonus XP you earned. (The Tourmalet earned my test bot 750XP.)

Double Dipping

Keen XP farmers will, of course, want to know how to maximize their earnings in these challenges. And there are certainly ways to do so! The trick is to figure out how to complete more than one of the three challenges (route, workout, and climb) in one go.

There really is no way to knock all three out at once, because you can’t do the Route of the Week and Climb of the Week at the same time. But you can certainly layer the Workout of the Week on top of a Route or Climb of the Week ride.

Alex from Zwift confirms, saying, “Yes, you can double dip! You just need to make sure you’re registered for both ahead of time until we update that.”

To register for a challenge, just click the challenge card on your homescreen. That signs you up for the challenge, and now, if you complete the route/workout/climb via another official pathway, it will still count.

(Note that it won’t always be this way. Alex also says, “You currently need to view each challenge to get credit for the ride, though you don’t have to start the route/workout/climb from the Challenge screen. We will soon change it so that you’re automatically registered for them on log in.”)

Two examples of double dipping (there are other ways to do this, but hopefully this illustrates how it works):

• Click the Workout of the Week challenge card, then return to your homescreen. (Now you’re registered for this week’s WotW Challenge). Click the Route of the Week card, and click the route to enter the map and begin your ride. Now go to Menu>Workouts (“E” keyboard shortcut) and choose this week’s featured workout from the library. (Emily’s Short Mix is under the “30 minutes to burn” category). Complete the workout and finish the route, and you’ll finish both challenges and get both bonuses.
• Click the Workout of the Week challenge card, then return to your homescreen. (Now you’re registered for this week’s WotW Challenge). Click the Climb of the Week card, and click the climb to enter the map and begin your ride. Now go to Menu>Workouts (“E” keyboard shortcut) and choose this week’s featured workout from the library. (Emily’s Short Mix is under the “30 minutes to burn” category). Complete the workout and finish the climb, and you’ll finish both challenges and get both bonuses.

Schedule of Upcoming Challenges

I don’t yet have the schedule of upcoming Workouts and Climbs of the Week, but I’ll share that ASAP in a separate post here on Zwift Insider. The Route of the Week schedule is available here.

Questions or Comments?

Share below!

Zwift version 1.96 begins its phased rollout today. This is a small update, but racers should take note of a fast new wheelset, and achievement badge completionists will want to know what’s changed on their badge list. Read on for details…

New ENVE SES 4.5 PRO Wheelset

The biggest news in this week’s update is a new, top-performing wheelset from ENVE. The real-life ENVE SES 4.5 PRO wheels were announced in July of this year, and ENVE shared that the wheels were developed with direct input from Tadej Pogačar and UAE Team Emirates XRG over two seasons. When the wheels were announced, they had amassed 25+ victories this season alone … before Tadej won the Tour de France!

The wheels are now available in the Drop Shop, accessible at level 29 and above, for a price of 675,000 Drops. They are the only wheelset in the Drop Shop with a 4-star rating for both aero and weight, so we expect them to be fast on the flats, and light on the climbs!

Watch this space for a detailed post about their performance once we finish our speed tests.

If you’d like to try the wheels before purchasing, September’s ZRacing events feature them, meaning everyone will be placed on these wheels for each of September’s races. (More info on September’s ZRacing will be published here on Zwift Insider tomorrow.)

Unearned Event-Only Badges Now Hidden

Zwift says, “In the Achievements screen, placeholder badges will now only be shown for routes that are available to all Zwifters in the Routes list. If a route is only accessible via an Event, the badge will be shown in the Achievements screen if it has been earned.”

The event-only route badge situation has been a messy one for years on Zwift. In the early days, event-only routes didn’t have achievement badges. That changed with the release of the Neokyo Crit Course in November 2021, the first event-only route to ever have an achievement badge and corresponding bonus XP.

Since then, more and more event-only routes have had achievement badges attached. But there are still many that don’t.

Zwifters who love earning achievement badges have been frustrated by their inability to earn badges for certain event-only routes, and this seems to be the driving force behind Zwift removing unearned event-only route badges from the list and the counter at the top.

To be clear, you can still earn these badges. They just aren’t visible until you earn them, making them like other hidden “extra credit” badges in Zwift.

Here’s a full list of event-only routes with achievement badges and associated XP, in case you want to make sure you earn all these badges:

Release Notes

Zwift provided notes on additional tweaks and bug fixes in this update:

• The in-game “Friends Zwifting” notification is no longer shown during Workouts.
• Fixed an issue that caused some environmental shadows to have jerky animations.
• Fixed a crash that could potentially occur when creating custom workouts.
• Fixed an issue that could cause water to flicker at some locations in France.
• Android: Improved Bluetooth connection reliability.
• Windows, Android: Stability improvements.

Discuss this update in Zwift’s forum >

Questions or Comments?

If you spotted any other changes or bugs in the update, please comment below!