Fun with SWAGs: What Will 14.3 Be? (And More)

Before we get SWAG-y, I'd like to get some quick thoughts out about 14.2 and also give you the results of an interesting little study I did last week.

Without further ado, a few thoughts on 14.2:

• Really cool to see a new WOD format for the Open.  We all know the Open has typically been filled with very basic, classic CrossFit WODs, so it was refreshing to see a workout like this come out. I think it took us all a couple of days to figure out the right strategy for this one.
• Personally, I would have liked to see the overhead squats either progress in weight or start a little bit higher. For the top-tier athletes, this was pretty much all about the chest-to-bar pull-ups. When Castro announced that the rounds would change in each 3:00 segment, I was really hoping to hear him say the weights would increase. But still... cool workout.
• Good to see that they set the breakpoints such that more athletes were able to get past the first round, unlike 13.5. Based on a really quick look, it looks like about 70% of the men reached the second round and about 30% of the women reached the second round.
• Looks like we saw quite a few people drop out in week 2. About 15% of the men and 15% of the women dropped out. That was a bigger percentage drop than we saw in any week last year, except for the women between 13.3 and 13.4 (19%). [UPDATE 4/12/2014 - This previously said the largest drop was between women's 13.2 and 13.3. That was a typo.] 

Also last week, I decided to try something new. I picked out two athletes who submitted scores by 9 a.m. on Friday morning, and each 12 hours after that, I tracked their progress on the leaderboard. My goal was to understand how the ranking of a particular score will evolve over the course of the weekend. Obviously an athlete's position would continue to get worse, but would his or her rank decrease (or increase) as a percentage of the field? If not, then an athlete could quickly get a sense of where his or her score might end up simply by checking out the percentile rank early on.

So let's see what happened. These athletes each were ranked in the 90th percentile at the start of the weekend, and I tracked the rank of the score, not necessarily the athlete. If the athlete retried the workout, their new score did not count towards this study.

Looking worldwide, we can see that in fact, the athlete's percentile stayed relatively stable. The men's percentile improved slightly, which I think is actually more typical. The women's score I picked was 87 (one rep away from finishing the 12's), and I suspect that a lot of women worked just hard enough to get that past hump on their second try.

Quickly, let's take a look at the progression in the region, which is generally more important for most of us.

Here we see that the athletes actually started at a lower (worse) percentile in the region. In the North American regions, this is probably common, since the only people performing the workouts that early on are generally strong athletes. In the rest of the world, those scores early on could come in normal Friday classes. But by 9 p.m. Friday, the athlete's percentile was pretty indicative of how things would finish up.

Anyway... on to the SWAG. Briefly, here is what we know:

• The movements left on the table (in order of how much emphasis has been placed on them in the past three years): burpee, thruster, jerk, toes-to-bar, box jump, muscle-up, wall ball, clean, deadlift, push-up.
• The LBEL so far is 0.38 for men and 0.27 for women. That's fairly close to the historical average for women (0.30), but below the historical average for men (0.46). So I think it's likely that things will get a bit heavier over the final three workouts than they have been to this point. That may or may not be true for 14.3 specifically, though.
• Neither workout so far has been particularly long. 14.1 was 10:00, and 14.2 had at most 9:00 of challenging work for any particular athlete, when you consider that the early rounds were nothing more than a warm-up for the top athletes.
• The first two workouts have been couplets. In 2011, there were three triplets, and in 2012 and 2013 there were two triplets each, so I think it's fair to assume we're getting a triplet soon. There were no single-modality workouts in 2013, and I doubt we'll see one this year.

With that as our framework, here we go with the SWAG for 14.3:

AMRAP 16 of 8 thrusters (115/75), 10 toes-to-bar, 12 bar-facing burpees

Again, you can pretty much take it to the bank that I will be way off. But it's not like you can do better. Of course, if you think you can, post SWAGs to comments. Enjoy 14.3 everyone!