2014 Crossfit Open Post-Mortem & Thoughts

Last week wrapped up the 2014 Crossfit Open. It was the 3rd one I participated in. As with those years, I thought it would be fun to crunch the numbers a bit and see how I did versus my plan, and how the Open itself is evolving. Most importantly, I wanted to see if I could glean any info about what I should work on for next year. (here are my summaries for 2013, 2012)

About the Open

f 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. Here's an updated version of what I wrote last year:

It's a competition anyone can enter. 5 workouts over the course of 5 weeks. Workouts released Thursday at 5pm, and scores must be entered online by 5pm Monday. Scores can either be validated by a CF Affiliate, 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.

My Goals for 2014

My goals for 2014 were to (a) to compete in the Open and finish all 5 workouts, (b) improve over last year, and (c) to finish somewhere in the 50-60% range among all competitors that finished all 5 workouts. I hit both those goals, though the numbers vary a bit depending how you measure them.

Some Stats and My Ranking for 2014

Here's a summary of some results. In 2013, they added a 40-44 age group, so I've included it and also calculated where I would have ranked within that group to gauge progress. This year I fell within the 45-49 age group, so I've included that but with no basis of comparison to last year. For all numbers, I sampled only the NW region to make the numbers more managable. However, in the 45-49 group, the numbers got small enough that it got a little noisy, so I compared vs worldwide with that.

Number relevant to my goal is that in the bottom right: Of men in my age group that finished all 5 workouts, I beat 48.8% of them worldwide. If you include those that didn't finish, I beat roughly two thirds.

In terms of improvement: I improved in all categories, with the exception of one: If I compare vs Men's 40-44, my rank among those that completed all 5 workouts actually dropped. Upon closer examination, I believe this is in part due to the percentage of people that did not finish all 5 being higher this year. In other words, people bailed on 14.5, and thus the remaining field was harder to beat.

These graphs give a visual and show the general trending. In all of them, A = those that beat me, B = those that finished all 5 workouts but did NOT beat me, and C = those that did not finish. The top left graph shows a general improvement over time, where I went from being in the bottom 1% of finishers to 15%, to 22%. Keep in mind that this is as the vast majority of people are improving as well. The graph on the top right you can see how many more people did not finish all 5 workouts vs last year (red line), so while I improved, I didn't improve vs the average of the remaining field.

Some General Observations

• I mostly liked the workouts this year. There was as good mix, and a couple of them (esp 14.5!) that were humbling and forced people to dig deep and push themselves.
• Given that there are new crossfitters every year, I wasn't crazy about a couple of workouts starting with movements that limited people right out of the gate (DUs, C2B pullups). 
• After doing this for almost 3 years now, more of the workouts were familiar. There were fewer of them that I came into with no idea how I'd do. I was able to look back at notes, come up with a plan, estimated finish time, etc.
• As a result of the above, as well as busy life circumstances, this was the first open I didn't do all the workouts twice. I only did two of them twice (will discuss that below). The others were "one and done".

A key observation relevant to all competitors who care where they rank.

• As the sport grows and the number of participants in the open grows, there is a general trend that your rank becomes increasingly dependent not on how well you do on all the workouts, but on the extent to which you don't do poorly on any single workout. As the leaderboard crowds, a poor showing on one wod can drop you dozens or hundreds of spots. The elite folk get this, but it's true across the board. I like this trend, as it rewards those that are overall well-rounded, but it's important to be aware of I think.

Analysis of the WODs

14.1: 

10 min AMRAP of 30 DUs + 15 Ground-to-Overhead at 75#.

This was one of the ones I redid, improving by about 5% over my first attempt. The graph below shows my 1st, 2nd attempt vs men overall. The graph on the right shows just my age group. You can kind of see the 'staircasing' with each round.

First time I did snatches until those failed, then went to CJs. Second attempt I did CJs right from the start. The learning here was that my strategy should not have been based just on weight, but on weight as compared to my max. 75# being 65% my max snatch, but only 40% my CJ max, so clearly I was going to fatigue less quickly on those - even if CJ is a slower lift. In the graph on the right you can see I beat about 60% of participants, so I was ok with this result.

14.2 

3 minute rounds to finish 2 rounds of 10 OH squats (95#) and 10 C2B Pullups. If finishing under 3 minutes, rest till exactly 3 minutes, proceed to round 2, which is 12+12, then at 6 minutes, 14+14, etc, etc.

I liked this one a lot. forced people to push hard. That said, I only made it past the first cut-off, but I love the format anyway. I told myself going in that if I didn't make 3 minutes, I'd do it again. I made the 3 minute market, but was MILES away from the 6 minute / 88 rep mark, so opted to not do a second time. Plus I beat about half the field in my age group, so I was happy with that.

14.3

8 min AMRAP of deadlifts and box jumps. Box jumps were all 15 at 24", but the deadlifts increased in reps & weight: 10 at 135#, 15 at 185#, 20 at 225#, 25 at 275#.

I got kind of a bum rap on this one. We got through the first 55 reps and the clock died, so we had to rest a couple minutes and start again, but I felt like it cost me. I got 96 reps I got through to the 275# set and got 6 reps. Had I been fresher, maybe another 4 reps? Thing was that even single reps helped move you up the leaderboard a lot here, as you can see by the slope of the middle of the graph above.

Unhappy, I went in 2 days later and did it again, but by the time I got to 225# I could tell I wasn't going to catch my last one. Ended up getting few reps fewer.

Anyhow, the clock thing doesn't matter. These things happen. Ultimately I need to get a higher DL number so those 275# lifts aren't as painful (as that's 90%  of my max). 70% of the field beat me on this workout :-(

14.4

The Chipper: 14 min amrap of: 60 cal row, 50 T2B, 40 wallball 20#, 30 Cleans 135#, 20 Muscle-ups

 This was one where I came in with a plan, having looked up what it took me in the past to do the different movements. I had a goal of getting to 180 (as I'm unable to do Muscle-ups). I got 172 reps, but also got 5 no-reps, so had I gone a bit faster and not messed those up, I'd have made 180. I was happy with my performance on this one.

Compared to the rest of the field, I did well on this one, beating 55% of folks in my age group that finished it.

14.5 

This one was brutal. 95# Thrusters and bar-facing burpees, in sets of 21/21, 18/18, 15/15... all the way down to 3/3, all for time. I felt for the newbies who had to finish it, some of them taking an hour or more.

My goal was 20 minutes, and in the end I came in at 21:35. I'd just come off a week of travel and had been eating crappy and didn't feel my best. That's all my fault though. If there's a lesson here, it's that it doesn't take much to drop your performance (couple days of poor sleep, poor eating, etc). I wasn't about to do it again though!

 Graphs above have the scale on the left in seconds, so lower is better. I beat 43% of the field on this one, so not quite here I wanted to be. (Another note: I wore oly shoes for this one, which helped me not round out for the thrusters  - but they felt like bricks on my feet during the burpees. Really should have dry-run a couple rounds with/without).

Post-Mortem On My Performance

I give myself a passing grade. I hit my target of being in the 50-60% range for my age group. I was also pleased at being able to assess the wods and come up with a plan, which I think speaks to my CF knowledge after doing this a couple years.

On the negative side, while I improved, there were places I didn't (deadlift/boxjump 14.3, for example). Several of the folk at my box that were in the same approximate rank as me last year, totally left me behind this year. Clearly there's still work to do. Diet has to be a big piece of that. Totally fell off the wagon just before the Open and it cost me.

Goals for 2014-2015

For next year's Open, in addition to my overall goals for 2014 (here), goal is to place in 40-50% range of people in my age group. I'll aim to not do the workouts twice unless I have a significantly different strategy or similar circumstances that would make a big difference.

I'm assuming there'll be some more sophisticated movements next year. I was sure we'd see HSPU. Maybe next year? Maybe Bar-MUs.

Onward and upward to next year!