2013 Crossfit Open post-mortem & thoughts

Now that the 2013 Crossfit Open is over, it's time to see how I did. I've been looking forward to doing this since last year. The 2012 Open was my first and I viewed it as setting a baseline upon which to improve. (my post-mortem on 2012 is here)

About the Open

If you are reading this, you probably already know about the Crossfit Open, and can skip to the next section. If you don't, some understanding of the basics would help, and are as follows:

It's a competition anyone can enter. 5 workouts over the course of 5 weeks. Workouts released Wednesday at 5pm, and scores must be entered online by 5pm Sunday. Scores can either be validated by a CF Affiliate gym, or submitted with a link to a YouTube video showing your performance. If it meets the documented standards, reviewers on the site will approve it as valid. Scores are ranked for each workout, and individual's scores for the whole event are a sum of their ranking (e.g. If you came in 1st, 2nd, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, your score would be 9). The video submission thing opens the door to a lot of controversy and bickering, but it's fun in the sense that every once in a while there can be a Cinderella story of someone coming out of nowhere and kicking butt.

Top 48 men and women in each region (there are 17 regions) go on to compete at regionals, and the top 3 men and women coming out of regionals go on to the games. There are also team categories and Masters categories for different age groups. Roughly 1% of entrants go to regionals, and 6% of those (0.06% of the total) go on to the Crossfit Games. For most of us, it's really just a chance to compete with our friends and gauge our progress.

Some Stats & My Ranking

Some basic stats are in the table below. Numbers may be off by a bit as I pulled them from the leaderboard manually, but this should be close enough.

There were more than doulbe the number of entrants, and more than double the number of people that finished all 5 workouts. At the regional level for the NW, it was a little less than double, so that would indicate CF growth (at least for the open?) is happening in the NW, but not to the same degree as elsewhere.

Last year I ranked in the 99th percentile of those that finished all 5 workouts, which is to say only better than 1% of entrants. This year, I finished in the 85th percentile, ahead of 15% of entrants. Pretty good considering that the entire field is moving forward (more on this when comparing some of the WODs later). It's also pretty good given that I did the first 3 WoDs with a recovering broken rib. By WOD4 it was back to 100%, but was only 80-90% feeling for the first 3 WODs.

When looking at the entire field (including those that didn't finish, those percentiles go to 66% for last year, and 57% for this year, but this is kind of immaterial vs the above number.

New this year they added a masters category for 40-44 year olds. When looking at that field, I finished ahead of 27% of competitors.

The charts below show my total score (which is basically rank across the 5 workouts in total) vs my rank on the leaderboard. From left to right they are 2012, 2013 men's with 1st and 2nd attempts (more on this later), and my 2013 men's masters 40-44 score.

Analysis of the WODs

WOD 13.1

So the first surprise out of the gate was a combination of the first 2 wods from last year's open. 12.1 was 7 minutes of burpees, and 12.2 was a 10 min snatch ladder. 13.1 was a combo of the in 17 minutes, interleaving them.

My burpee performance improved. It was a weak point for me in last year's open so I did 12.1 several time over the course of the year. The snatch ladder, however, was still a show stopper for me. Snatch is my weakest lift, and while my ORM has gone from 95 to 115 over the year, the #135 weight was still out of reach.

This year  they added a tie-breaker time at the end of each snatch set, so it helped that I'd worked on the burpees. Last year I tied about 400 other people, but this year I could tell where I ranked in the 'plateau' of people that couldn't get beyond that lift, as shown below. This was one of the areas for improvement I suggested in my post last year (I'm sure many others had the same idea) and I was glad to see it addressed.

The graph below shows my 1st and 2nd attempts vs the mens field (top) and vs the 40-44 men (bottom). You can see a fair number of people that were stopped by the #135 snatch, and a smaller plateau at the next level.

[A note on how to read these, in case it's not clear: The lower of the above graphs shows 485 people finishing the workout, ranked from best to worst score, where the best was just over 170 reps, and my score was 100 reps, with a rank of 397th place.]

WOD 13.2

Workout 2 was a stronger one for me. Deadlifts, shoulder-to-overhead, and box jumps. A big part of my improvement here was switching to step-ups for my second attempt. It also helped to jerk the presses right from the start. That put me ahead of 26% of the field, and ahead of 30% of the men 40-44. My 1st attempt I didn't do step-ups, and also didn't push as hard, so there was a big improvement for my 2nd attempt.

WOD 13.3

WOD3 was repeat of 12.4. 150 wallballs, 90 DUs, and 30 MUs, in a 12 min timecap. I still can't do a MU, so my goal was just to get as many of the wallballs and DUs as possible. My first attempt I didn't even get the wallballs done. My second I got them done and got 24 DUs which was an improvement. For me it was a lesson in having a plan and pacing myself accordingly (more on this later).

The second attempt put me ahead of 30% of all men participating, and ahead of almost 40% of all the men 40-44. Given that I didn't do that well, I think this is telling about how people do workouts like Karen (150 WB for time). Knowing your own ability, pacing yourself, and not getting tripped up by the huge number of reps (One of our trainers, Bryan Miller, called Karen and workouts like it a 'SMMF' - a Single Movement Mind-Fuck). Small errors on pacing and/or on form can add up over that many reps.

WOD 13.4

13.4 was one I *should* have done a lot better on. A ladder of Clean and Jerk (a lift I'm ok at) and Toes-to-bar (which I'm pretty good at). I came into it after a week of travel and poor eating, which didn't help, and then did 2 attempts in 2 days. On the second attempt I was much better about form, which helped, but was fatigued from the previous day, which didn't.

For this one, I finished ahead of 18% of the men's field, and ahead of 24% of the men's 40-44 group.

WOD 13.5

This was a beast of a workout promising to be hard for everyone and even harder for the elite. "Fran" (21-15-9 of thrusters and pullups) is an iconic Crossfit benchmark WOD, and is extremely challenging to do once. To do it at a slightly heavier weight and with chest-to-bar pullups is even harder. To do it under 4 minutes is the stuff of the elite. To do it twice under 4 minutes to go on to do it a 3rd time... is inhuman.

As the charts below show, the vast majority of participants did not go beyond the 4 minute time cap to get 90 reps. You can see a small step in the top graph below where only 7% of men went beyond the 4 minute timecap, and less than 0.1% of men went beyond 8 minutes. (FWIW, the numbers for women were 1% and 0.02%)

My best fran time is 7:30. Given that the C2B are harder than regular pullups, and the thrusters were 5% heavier, I expected to get approximately halfway through, or approximately 45 reps, in 4 minutes. I got 42, so a little shy of that. That put me ahead of 19% of men and ahead of 23% of men 40-44. Not bad I guess, but I can do better.

Can 2013 and 2012 be compared?

As the total community of participants grows, is it improving? In adding 80,000 new participants, were they added at the bottom, or sprinkled throughout the field? A couple ways to look at this:

• In 12.2, 16% of people got stuck unable to do the 135# snatch. In 13.1, that was now 23%. Of course they were doing that with 40 burpees ahead of time. Still,it points to a 'growing tail'. Similarly, in 12.2, 25% were able to get a 165# snatch; whereas in '13, only 15% were able to do so. Still that's MORE people that are getting to that level when you multiply by the total. So that would indicate the field ovrall is improving, but the tail is growing more.
• In comparing 12.4 and 13.3, the most apples-to-apples comparison, In 2012, 10% of entrants didn't get through the wallballs, and 35% got at least 1 MU. In 2013, 15% didn't get through the wallballs, and 33% got at least 1 MU. Again, this means the absolute number of people being larger at both ends of the curve. 
• Here's a graph comparing 12.4 (blue) and 13.3 (red), normalized to the same X scale (think of it as 1-100% of the field). It's surprising how similar they are! We can see an increase at the elite end of the scale, with a fair number of people doing WAY more MUs than anyone did last year. Even more obvious though, is a higher percentage of the field scoring lower on WBs and DUs. This again points to a growing tail of new crossfitters, and possibly a more casual crossfitter that might not have entered the open in 2012 but did in 2013.

• When comparing my own scores against these comparable workouts, the difference doesn't the needle that much. So for example, on 13.3, my score of 174 put me ahead of 30% of the field. The same score in 12.4 would have put me ahead of 24% of the field. So while there's a delta, I can still see that my own progress is ahead of that of the curve as a whole.

Post-Mortem on my Performance

OK, so what have I learned?

• I've definitely improved and that's encouraging. Definitely the best thing about the Open for me is a nice sample point to gauge my own progress.
• I did every workout twice, and improved on each one, sometimes significantly. Why? I think there are three things at play here: (1) My first attempts were mostly at my 5:45AM class. I think I'm a little slower then than later in the day. This is a minor factor though. (2) Doing it later, as well as doing it twice, let me come up with a plan. This is WAY more important than I realized. For example, my first attempt at the 150 wallballs, I did sets of 15, then 10, then 5, pausing as needed, and ran out of time. My second attempt, I had a plan: Sets of 5, breaks of 2 seconds or less. added 30 to my score this way. (3) In my first attempt, I was not pushing myself as hard. By the second attempt, I knew my score to beat, and knew friends scores to try and shoot for.
• I identified, or at least confirmed, weak spots I need to work on: Snatches, DUs, MUs, C2Bs, and overall metabolic conditioning are things to go focus on.

Suggestions for the Games Organizers

Not that anyone is listening, but some ideas to consider:

1. The first suggestion I had last year was to think about how to address the staircase effects some of the WODs had an how that affected distribution across the leaderboard. The 'tie breaker' times addressed this. So that's one problem gone.

2. We saw some scores disqualified and at least 1 box lose their ability to judge submissions, due to poor judging. We heard tons of stories of people improperly judging, etc. This is a massive rathole topic and one I'm sure the organizers are struggling with - I hope they can keep the spirit of the open while trying to temper this. Maybe something like spot-checks on affiliates for judging to standards; and some amount of tolerance for video submissions (e.g. if someone has a couple bad reps in there, allow them to readjust score and resubmit, rather than saying "no good!").

Finally, the custom leaderboards were a fun addition, but I'll re-post what I suggested last year:

3. PLEASE! Publish an API to get read-only access to the leaderboard data. There is SO much that could be done here if you open this data up to developers. I just did a quick and dirty look at one region, and with a sparse sampling. If you had full access it would be trivial to do a number of compelling things. Some ideas:

• Compare curves across regions. Do some areas fare better at the strength-focused workouts? Do some areas have more beginners or more elites?
• Look at standard deviation of rank. For an individual, do you have one area where your rank was out of whack with the other workouts? does that give you an indication of what to work on? How about for a whole box? Does your box suck at a particular workout or area? If so does that tell you something about your programming?
• If someone read the data and took snapshots of it, you could do "motion chart" style animations of how the curves proceeded over the ~100 hours from posting to close. Do the elites submit at the last minute? How many people posted 2 or more scores? etc.
• If someone is 1-2 years away from transitioning to another age group, they could see how they'd rank.
• How about special shout-outs for most improved year-on-year? 

Those area just a couple ideas that come to mind. I'm sure if the organizers opened this up, they'd be surprised at how innovative ideas would come out of nowhere.

So on to training and improving for the Open in 2014!