Week 3 Dropout Statistics

Thanks to everybody who's commented so far on the blog!  There are some open questions to be decided for sure, in particular the height relationship on performance.  Rest assured it's being looked and will be presented in the future.

Erg.  I wanted to be able to cite specific numbers regarding the dropouts from week 2 to week 3.  I have learned, however, that HQ isn't showing a perfect leaderboard each week, which probably doesn't surprise a few folks given the comments I've seen on some of the pages.  For example, when I gathered the week 3 data for the men, there were a few hundred names that were not present in the week 2 data set.  I presume these folks actually had scores for week 2, but for whatever reason were not posted on the leaderboard at the end of week 2.  That alone would be fine, but in general, I think it means I can't totally trust that week 3's leaderboard contains all the continuing athletes.  Thus, I think the histograms below might be off by a few percent.

Overall the dropout percentage was similar across M/F boundaries - 23% (Men), and 24% (Women).  I estimate that the true number is +/- a few percent at most.

The first plot below shows, for each 5 pound female weight class, what percentage of athletes dropped in week 3.  Remember, this plot does not represent all athletes, just athletes that bothered to fill out their weight information.  While the absolute numbers might be slightly off, my prediction from earlier seems to have held.  Almost 50% of athletes under 110 pounds did not complete week 3.  Cuts were felt all around though, and even the lowest drop percentage was still around 15%.

From a performance standpoint, how did these athletes do?  This next plot shows the scatter of week 2 versus week 1 scores.  Blue dots represent athletes who finished week 3, and red dots are athletes who dropped (wk3 score = 1, or nothing).  A quick inspection reveals many of the drops occuring in the lower scores (lower left), but a surprising number are in the middle.

Week 3 heavily pruned female athletes that were light (left), and who received lower scores in weeks 1 and 2 (right).  Note: I am not  confident that the red dots in the highest performing areas (upper right) of the scatter chart are real dropouts.  They might be absent from the leaderboard, as discussed above.

The same plots for the men are less dramatic.  Interestingly, while the dropout percentage has a strong trend downward, the drops by wk1 and wk2 performance seem more scattered.  I can only conclude that some drops might result from people just not having the time to do the workout as directed, rather than some limitation in performance.

Sadly, I couldn't muster one rep for week3's WOD.   Our workout group had just started power cleans a month ago, and I had recently managed to clean my weight (~140).  In a fairly dumb move, I attempted a squat clean at 165 and not only managed to fail miserably, but also managed to sprain my wrist. 

Dropouts followed a similar weight trend as females (left), but surprisingly their performances seemed to be fairly uniform (right), except maybe in the very elite categories.  Ignore the big bar at 275, it's from low number stats.