Week 4 data download and Mike's analysis

Mike has been tearing it up this year doing some great plots.  Head on over his way and enjoy his commentary.

Quick note for analyzers out there:  Jeff has scraped the latest data (thanks, Jeff!).  His comment on the dataset, as well as the link are as follows:

From Jeff:

This update includes several new features:

- Regional Ranks per event in addition to Overall Ranks per event.
- Masters Divisions now properly account for bubble ages (44 yrs old now, but will be 45 in July)
- Age07 is Age in July. Is only different than "current age" for 390 bubble Masters.

Data file can be found here: http://media.jsza.com/CFOpen2012-wk4.zip

Predicted 12.5 performances

Hooray for HQ!  As many have figured out, 12.5 is the exact same workout as 11.6 last year, which cleverly allows people to judge their improvement from one year to the next.  What's super nice, is that it also allows us to ask questions that would be difficult to answer.  For example, is the field of crossfit open participants getting better as a whole?  Without the constant variable that 12.5 provides, this question could only be answered with vast amounts of speculation.  Answering it now, will just require a comparison of raw scores from one year to the next.

For people interested in last year's performance scores for 11.6 (the same as 12.5), here are the cumulative plots for the participants that finished all 6 workouts, in the main male and female categories.  It looks like the 50th percentile for men is slightly below 90 reps, while for women it's about 73 reps.  For those headed to regionals and aiming for the 95th percentile, aim for 125 reps and 110 reps for males and females, respectively.  Of course, it all depends on your given situation and your standings now.

The final data for workout 11.6, which is the same WOD as this year's 12.5.  My speculation is that the curves won't change too much from last year's to this year's, although I've been wrong before, plenty of times.

Also note, for men, if you're on the cusp of regionals, have a BMI of around 26-27 and a height of 5'10" and below, you should rock this thing.  This workout heavily favors the shorter and huskier as seen here in the below figure, plotting the average score for each height weight combination.  Details of how to interpret the figure can found in this previous link.

Predicted relationship between height/weight and WOD 12.5 performance.   If you have a BMI above 30, you may be in trouble (blue areas).  

Week 12.3 percentile plots

One thing I have trouble doing with the leaderboard is quickly scanning how many reps you need to rank in a certain percentile.  This is especially true after Thursday, where droves of scores make scrolling through the leaderboard the devil.

Here - I make it easy! Thanks to Andrew, I've managed to scrape the leaderboard and plot cumulative distributions for week 3.   Want to know how many reps you need for the 50th percentile?  Just go to the y-axis, go to 0.5, and run your finger across until it hits the pink (Ind. Women) or Blue (Ind. Men) lines.   Drop down, and then there's the target number of reps.  Going from reps to percentile is also pretty easy, just reverse the process.

Caveat, this is still pretty early, so the curves could change a bit, especially at the extremes (ie near 0 or near 1).  Ballpark though, I bet it'll work for most people.

Oh, the little bump on the pink line near low percentiles?  That's apparently a few folks that have trouble doing a toe-to-bar.  I wondered about that myself.

For those interested in the code, I've enclosed the matlab file I used to scrape the pages and organize it how I like it.  It's definitely rough around the edges, so if somebody would like to use it and make it better, by all means!