Monday of this week was the close of score submittals for this year's Open, marking for most of us the end of it for this year. Time to compare scores with friends and the rest of the field, and watch the fire-breathers go on to Regionals, and the best of them move on to the Games.
It is also the best time to look at individual results and see what can be learned about weaknesses, where to improve, etc. This was my fourth Open. I started Crossfit in June 2011, and so did the 2012, 2013, and 2014 Open events and now this year's.
As with the years, I thought it would be fun to crunch the numbers a bit and see how I did versus my plan, versus previous years, and to reflect on 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. (For anyone interested, here are my summaries for
2014,
2013,
2012).
About the Crossfit Open
If you're 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 20 (previously 48 - they are making it harder) men and women in each of 17 regions go on to compete at one of 8 super-regionals, and the top few men and women coming out of those go on to the Games. There are also team categories and Masters categories for different age groups. Roughly 0.25% of entrants will go to regionals (definitely harder than last year), and ~12% of those (0.03% 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.
[Note that for Masters (40+ age groups) rather than Regionals, they have an additional set of qualifier workouts released online for the top 200 individuals per division, worldwide. Also note that the size of the competitive field thins with older groups (e.g. Women 40-44 had ~6600 competitors; 45-49 had 3600; 50-54 had ~2400; 55-59 had ~1100, and 60+ had 528). Phrased another way, Only 1 in 30 in the 40-44 group will make the top 200, whereas it's better than 10x that. This is somewhat immaterial though, since either way all that matters is the 19 competitors beside you at Regionals. But I digress...]
My Goals for 2014
My goals for this years were simple:
- Improve over last year
- Place in the 40-50% percentile for my age group
- NOT do every workout twice (though I did leave room for doing a workout twice if I thought I'd learned a different strategy would have a very different outcome).
- In addition, once they announced there'd be a scaled option, I understood that meant that the workouts would be harder than previous years, and I set a goal of doing them all Rx.
The good news is I hit the 1,2, and 4. I'd argue 1 and 2 are the more important ones. I also did all the workouts Rx, which I'm pleased about. Especially since I called out last year that I expected HSPU to be added, as well as more MU's (you can see where I called this in last year's summary).
However, I did 4 of the 5 workouts twice. In 3 of these cases, 15-1, 15-2 and 15-4, I learned something about my technique that let me approach it differently and score more reps. In 15-3 though, I just was hungry for more, and was so wrecked from the first time I did the workout, even after 2 days rest, that I couldn't even manage a few muscle-ups. I did take a lesson away from this, but more on that later.
Stats & Ranking for 2015
This year introduced a scaled option, and so that changes the numbers in a couple ways. First off, there's a decision from CF HQ to rank all scaled scores beneath all Rx scores. Not an issue for me as I did all the workouts as prescribed. It's hard to say if having the scaled option encouraged more beginner-level people to sign up, skewing the demographics some. (I don't think that's the case btw, as the growth curve for participants seems to follow the same curve it has since 2011).
As with last year, what I did was pulled data from the NW region only (past years said it was more or less statistically representative of all regions). I then compared myself to the Men's division for all ages, also to my age group (45-49) and also to the 40-45 group. The latter of these I included just for comparison's sake, since I was in that group 2 years ago.
The high level take-away from all this is that I'm still improving, and doing so at a rate that exceeds how the rest of the community is improving. My goal was to make it in the 40-50% range for my age group, meaning "outperform 50-60% of the participants". As the bottom right of the above table shows, I beat 76.1% of entrants in my age group, and 63.1% of those who finished all 5 workouts.
The charts below give a visual of year-on-year improvement. The (C) area below the red line shows the number of participants who didn't finish all five workouts. The (B) area below the blue line shows those I beat, and (A) above the blue line are those that beat me. The top table is all men in the NW region. The middle table is the 40-44 age group I was in up until last year, and is only included for comparison. The bottom group is my age group (45-49), and you can see a pretty significant improvement over last year.
Some General Observations
I liked the workouts this year even more than last year. I liked that the addition of a scaled division let them up the stakes on the types of movements & weights involved in the Rx division, while also allowing more people participate in the Open. Having a workout START with MU's, or involving cleans at my one rep max, or snatches at my one rep max - it was just the right level for me to require a serious gut check if I wanted to go Rx on all the workouts. 15.5 was a great workout of the muscle between your ears.
The addition of a scaled option was great for folk that otherwise would have been limited right out of the gate by MUs or DUs or HSPUs.
After doing this for almost 4 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... for most of them, but not all. For some of the harder movements, my plan wasn't accurate and I learned something going in, that made me want to do them a second time.
A key observation I made last year that I think still stands and is worth noting:
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.
This is definitely true. My overall ranking placed me better than any one individual event - this is an indicator that I was more consistent than many. For example, people that beat me on 3-4 events but then couldn't do MUs and tanked on their score on that even, ended up ranking below me overall.
Analysis of the individual workouts:
15.1 & 15.1A
The Open started out differently by grouping two workouts that needed to be done back to back. 15.1 was a triplet of Toes-to-Bar (I'm ok at these), Deadlifts, and Snatches. The latter two were both at 115, which meant the deadlifts were light for me, but the Snatches were at my one rep max(!). As a result, I had a bunch of missed reps due to poor form. I chose to do it a second time, and just concentrated on taking my time and not missing any snatches, even if it slowed me down.
In looking at the graphs below, They rank the #1 ranked person to the last placed person from left to right. The second 'S-curve' on each graph is for the scaled entries. The graph on the left is for all ages, the graph on the right is for the 45-49 year old division.
15.1 works out to a pretty straight-forward S-curve.
15.1 A, on the other hand, offers some interesting observations.The workout was a one-rep max Clean & Jerk, which had to be performed within the 6 minutes of finishing 15.1.
Once again, we see an S-curve, but with a staircase-type shape to it. Why? Well of course because people load barbells in increments. Not just increments of 5 or 10 lbs, but also more often in increments based on the common plate sizes. So we'd expect to see 135 (bar + 45# plates), 185 (bar + 45+25), 225 (bar+45+45), etc.
And indeed, that's what we see. 10# steps, but the steps at these 'common combinations' are larger (185, 225 for example). The other thing is that for all people lifting a given weight, they were ranked based on weight class. If you look at the chart on the left, I blew up a portion of it to show where I ranked. I lifted 185, but only had a few people at lower body weight than me that lifted the same, and a LOT of people (over 300) that lifted the same weight but weighed more than me.
So what does this mean for strategy? Well, if you know you are going to max out around one of these common configurations, you should REALLY try to get just a bit more on the bar. Even 1 lb plates, if allowed. This is especially true if you are a heavy person compared to others at the same level. On the other hand, if you are on the light side, you should kill yourself to get to that next plateau. I missed my lift at 195 (cleaned it but missed the jerk), and had I nailed it I'd have jumped 300 spots on the leaderboard. Maybe I'd have made it if I knew this ;-)
15.2
This one was a repeat from last year, a couplet of OH Squats and C2B Pullups, with a rep scheme that increased every 3 minutes. I saw an improvement from last year, but wasn't entirely pleased with my performance. Suprisingly, I finished ahead of more of the field in my age group than I'd expect, but still I know I need to work on OH squats. No surprises here.
15.3
This is where things got serious. Similar to 13.3, but this time -opening- with the muscle-ups. This was a limited for a lot of people, as can be seen by the number of people that went scaled (esp in the 45-49 age group). However, that's why there's a scaled division. Its an advanced movement, but a fundamental one that people should be working on. They sent a message with this that said 'If you don't have your MU yet, you have a hole in your fitness".
Since I've only had them for a short while, I didn't know how I'd fair. I came out too strong, tired myself, then missed a bunch of reps. In the end I got the first 7, and did the 150 wallballs and DUs. If I'd gone slower, done them 1 at a time and rested, getting 7/7 instead of 7/12, I mighted have gotten a couple into the second round. I came back 2 days later for another go, but was so sore still that I couldn't get more than 2 MUs and gave up.
If there's a lesson here, its that if you aren't sure of your abilities, you're better off going at a steady methodical pace rather than going all out and fatiguing and/or missing reps.
15.4
This one opened with handstand pushups, another advanced movement, and then paired it with cleans at 185#, which had been my one rep max until 15.1!
I thought my limiter was going to be the cleans, since I figured I was at least OK on HSPU. However, they were BOTH limiters for me and here's why.
- There was a new standard for measuring full extension on the handstand pushups. Turned out I'd been bowing my back while doing them.... a lot. As a result I got a lot of failed reps. When I did the workout a second time, I slowed down and focused on form. Lesson: Focus on form.
- When training HSPU, I've been using an ab-mat to not bump my head, but it also let me avoid doing the lowest (hardest) 1". That inch killed me. Lesson: Cutting corners will catch up to you.
- I've been doing HSPU strict - which is harder than kipping. While that's good, when I was fatigued from doing them to full depth, it sure would have helped. However, it was not the time to learn DURING the Open workout. Lesson: get your movements down before, not during, a comp.
- Finally, for the cleans, I learned that due to poor form (early elbow bend), my cleans are better from the hang. Again, not the time to fix this during the open. So when I went back and re-did it, no missed reps.
15.5
This was just a grind. As Dave Castro pointed out (but I only heard this after I'd done it), it mainly tested the muscle between your ears. When gasping for air, hands on your knees, are you going to pick up the bar or not? I'm convinced that my main reason for fairing poorer than I'd have liked on this one is that I didn't have the right attitude. Like with 14.5, or when I PR'd Grace earlier this year, I should have had someone yelling at me, not allowing more than a 5 or 6 second rest after putting the bar down. Also, I have a hunch that going a little easier on the rower would have kept me fresher on the bar (resting less) without too much cost to the rowing time.
So, what have we learned?
My lessons I'm taking away to use for next year's Open, or any other comp:
- One of the skills a crossfitter should have is a knowledge of your skills and abilities. I am going to work on training this. I should be able to look at a workout and say "I believe that will take me X minutes", or similar. Then push that envelope, but by a reasonable margin.
- If you are testing a new-ish movement in a comp, better to err on the side of moderate, steady pace, rather than going to hard and falling apart.
- If you have a way of doing something that is flawed in form, but that works for you, work on fixing it, but not during the comp. Do what works for you at that time.
- Cutting corners will catch up with you.
- Form matters - if there's something that you've let work at bad form for a long time, go back and work on it at much lower weight, dial form in before increasing (for me, this will be HSPU, snatches, cleans, OH squat)
- Go in with the right attitude and have a plan of attack, including target split times, length of breaks, etc.
Goals for 2016 Open
Aside from my overall training goals for the year, goals for the open:
- Finish ahead of 80% of the field in the 45-49 age group
- Do all the workouts Rx (and I expect them to get harder)
- Be prepared for more of the advanced movements in the Rx workouts: MU's (15.3 will almost certainly come back), HSPU, BarMU, Pistols, etc.
- Also, the weights will go up. I consider myself lucky there wasn't an event with a 135# snatch. I'd better get that down by next year.
- Have a better level of knowledge of my ability with some of the advanced movements to form a better game plan. e.g. If they had a wod that was "AMRAP MUs in 10 minutes", I should have an estimate that isn't too far out. today I have no idea what it would be.
That's it. Comments welcome!
