April 11, 2026

The Open by the Numbers: What the Last 5 Years Tell Us

Five years of CrossFit Open data broken down by movement frequency and pairings — and what I'm personally taking away from it.

The rig-ladder has become the most preferred method of sorting athletes by strength and ability. This year it dawned on me that workouts that were self-sorting were increasing in frequency, and now I have data to confirm those suspicions.

March 16, 2026

Building a 15-Year CrossFit Open Database with Claude (And Auditing the Results)

I handed Claude a vague goal — build a queryable database of every CrossFit Open workout from 2011 to 2026 — and watched what it did. How it stored data, where it sourced the gaps, and whether I could trust the result.

The 2026 Open just wrapped. And now that the gym is back to normal, I find myself doing what I always do: overthinking the Open workouts. Which movements keep showing up? Are AMRAPs actually more common than For Time workouts, or does it just feel that way? And is the rig ladder format — the one that ends every Open with a pull-up-to-C2B-to-muscle-up escalation — a recent programming method?