WOD Data: CrossFit Open 15.5

After five ‘suspenseful’ Thursday announcements, and five times laid out on the mat, we’ve got the 5th breakdown for the stats crowd.

I’ve got plans for at least one more post about the Open, so please, post any requests for analyses here in the comments or in this reddit thread.

Participation and Scaling

In the end, 55% of the 262,037 athletes who registered posted a score all 5 weeks, and 25% completed all 5 WODs at Rx. Congrats if you’re in either of those groups. 15.3 (muscle ups) definitely took the crown for most scaled, while the 20 or 30 lb discount was not enough to convince many to do scaled for the finale.

Observant regular readers might notice that this chart shows more attrition than the plots I made in previous weeks. It turns out that’s because I scraped the leaderboard on Monday night for 15.1 and 15.2 and later in the week for 3 through 5. Since coaches have until Wednesday to validate scores, I had undercounted the participation in weeks 1 and 2. The complete downloadable data is now updated for each wod on my site.

15.5 Rx

27-21-15-9 reps for time of: Row (calories) Thrusters (95/65)

Only the second “for time” Open workout ever after last year’s 14.5 and once again we get a beauty of a distribution. We can see a lot of men who were motivated to get sub-10 minute times and big notches for the women at sub-15 and sub-16.

Can we quantify how much people want a “sub-something” time? There’s no explanation for spikes in the distribution in this WOD around switching movements or equipment since everyone finished after the same 72nd thruster. And yet, we see that Rx athletes were 18% more likely to finish in the last 10 seconds of a minute than the first 10 seconds. Finishing at something:30 is the most common, and men and women are doing just about the same thing on this front.

The median man finished about 80 seconds ahead of the median woman and that gap was actually pretty constant all the way to the top of the leaderboard with Fraser and Paquette finishing 67 seconds faster than Colleen Fotsch.

15.5 Scaled

27-21-15-9 reps for time of: Row (calories) Thrusters (65/45)

The scaled WOD this week was only different by weight, so the patterns in outcomes look super similar.

Age

Ah, to be 25 again.

Height & Weight

I heard opposite predictions on height for 15.3 since the lanky folks get those mile-long pulls on the rower, but have to push most of the way to the ceiling on the thrusters. How did it play out? I’m going to say the tall women benefitted slightly more than the men. You can see in the last plot that no matter how tall a guy was, there was a sweet spot on weight, where as almost all of the women over 5’9″ were well above the median.

I’m planning to do at least one more post about the Open with regional, gym, and multi-year analyses. In the mean time, this has been a blast. Post analysis requests here in the comments or on Reddit, or download the data and do your own exploring.