Cebul.la · Writing · Brant Cebulla · · Updated
What’s a good Grace (CrossFit) time?
A good Grace is 2:09 for men and 2:33 for women. A great Grace is 1:48 for men and 2:01 for women. A good time beats about 75% of the people who posted a Grace on a CrossFit Games profile, and a great time beats about 90%. The median is 2:47 for men and 3:14 for women.
Grace is 30 clean and jerks for time. Men use 135 lb. Women use 95 lb.
Where these times come from
This is the same CrossFit Games profile scrape as the Fran post: athlete IDs 1 through 299,999. Of 60,843 men and 34,241 women, 19,931 men and 6,848 women had typed in a Grace. I kept times from 1:00 to 15:00, which leaves 19,827 men and 6,835 women. The other entries include 0:01 and times past 15 minutes.
An earlier version of this post used 530 men and 184 women from a smaller 2014 scrape, described in Gathering CrossFit data: the methodology. The times below replace those.
About 33% of the men and 20% of the women on these profiles posted a Grace. People who know the time and enter it are a fitter group than a typical class. The profile records the time and leaves out the load on the bar. Men who finish from 1:00 up to 1:30 report a median clean and jerk of 325 lb. Men who finish from 6:00 up report a median of 195 lb, which lines up with the fast times being the 135 lb workout.
How the times are spread
For men, the mean is 3:08 and the median is 2:47. The mean is slower because of a tail past 5:00. About four in five men finish from 1:00 up to 4:00, and the busiest stretch is 2:00 to 3:00. A 2:09 beats about 75% of the men, a 1:48 beats about 90%, and a 1:37 beats about 95%. Each bar below is one minute, so the 2:00 bar is 2:00 up to 3:00.
Show the numbers
| Time | Athletes |
|---|---|
| 1:00 | 3,688 |
| 2:00 | 7,888 |
| 3:00 | 4,453 |
| 4:00 | 1,957 |
| 5:00 | 914 |
| 6:00 | 431 |
| 7:00 | 210 |
| 8:00+ | 286 |
For women, the mean is 3:36 and the median is 3:14. The bars are the same one-minute spans, and the busiest stretch is also 2:00 to 3:00. A 2:33 beats about 75% of the women, a 2:01 beats about 90%, and a 1:50 beats about 95%. At the median, the women are about 16% slower than the men, 3:14 against 2:47.
Show the numbers
| Time | Athletes |
|---|---|
| 1:00 | 614 |
| 2:00 | 2,265 |
| 3:00 | 1,914 |
| 4:00 | 1,045 |
| 5:00 | 505 |
| 6:00 | 220 |
| 7:00 | 119 |
| 8:00+ | 153 |
The table is the lookup. Each percentage is the share of posted times slower than the time in the first column. A man who finishes in 3:00 has beaten 40.6% of the men here. A woman who finishes in 3:00 has beaten 56.8%.
| Time | Men | Women |
|---|---|---|
| 1:30 | 97.1% | 98.8% |
| 2:00 | 80.5% | 90.3% |
| 2:30 | 60.7% | 76.3% |
| 3:00 | 40.6% | 56.8% |
| 3:30 | 28.0% | 42.0% |
| 4:00 | 18.6% | 29.4% |
| 5:00 | 8.9% | 14.2% |
| 6:00 | 4.5% | 7.1% |
Age
The headline numbers mix every age. In the individual division, ages 18-34, the median is 2:35 for men and 3:03 for women. The time that beats about 75% of that division is 2:01 for men and 2:26 for women. From there the median slows by about 10 to 25 seconds every five years. The men’s rows run from 11,615 athletes aged 18-34 to 94 aged 60+. The women’s rows run from 4,221 to 165 at ages 50-54. Teens are barely in the scrape. The 55-59 women’s row is 46 athletes, and the 60+ row is 24, so those groups are left out. The 75th column beats about 75% of that age group, and the 50th column is the median.
| Age | 75th | 50th |
|---|---|---|
| 18-34 | 2:01 | 2:35 |
| 35-39 | 2:11 | 2:45 |
| 40-44 | 2:25 | 3:04 |
| 45-49 | 2:45 | 3:28 |
| 50-54 | 2:59 | 3:48 |
| 55-59 | 3:10 | 4:07 |
| 60+ | 3:41 | 4:23 |
| Age | 75th | 50th |
|---|---|---|
| 18-34 | 2:26 | 3:03 |
| 35-39 | 2:33 | 3:12 |
| 40-44 | 2:52 | 3:30 |
| 45-49 | 3:05 | 3:55 |
| 50-54 | 3:27 | 4:18 |
Predicting a Grace time
Grace is thirty clean and jerks, so the max clean and jerk on the same profile predicts it well. Among the 18,953 men who posted both, and whose clean and jerk was between 135 and 450 lb, that one number accounts for 54% of the variation in Grace times.
Clean and jerks posted in kilograms were converted to pounds. Each extra pound on the clean and jerk is associated with a Grace about 0.7% faster. A 275 lb clean and jerk predicts 2:27. A 225 lb clean and jerk predicts 3:28.
For the 6,534 women who posted both, with a clean and jerk from 95 to 320 lb, the same model accounts for 53% of the variation.
Each extra pound is associated with a Grace about 1% faster. A 155 lb clean and jerk predicts 3:32. A 135 lb clean and jerk predicts 4:20.
These associations describe the athletes who posted both numbers. A Grace much slower than the prediction, at a given clean and jerk, comes from the rep cycle and the rest between reps. The strength is already in the max.