A good Fran is 2:59 for men and 3:56 for women. A great Fran is 2:32 for men and 3:05 for women. A good time beats about 75% of the people who posted a Fran on a CrossFit Games profile, and a great time beats about 90%. The median posted time is 3:56 for men and 5:09 for women.
Fran is 21-15-9 of barbell thrusters and pull-ups, for time.
- 21 barbell thrusters
- 21 pull-ups
- 15 barbell thrusters
- 15 pull-ups
- 9 barbell thrusters
- 9 pull-ups
Men use 95 lb. Women use 65 lb. A thruster is a front squat into a push press.
Where these times come from
I pulled self-reported benchmark scores from CrossFit Games athlete profiles, athlete IDs 1 through 299,999. The scrape has 60,843 men and 34,241 women. Of those, 25,628 men and 8,030 women had typed in a Fran time. I kept times from 1:40 to 20:00, which leaves 25,518 men and 8,012 women. The other 128 times fall outside that window, including 0:01 and half-hour entries.
An earlier version of this post used a much smaller scrape from 2014: 714 men and 198 women. That scrape is described in Gathering CrossFit data: the methodology. The times below replace those figures.
About 42% of the men and 23% of the women on these profiles posted a Fran. People who know their time and take the trouble to enter it are a fitter group than a typical CrossFit class. A time that looks ordinary in the charts below can still be a strong time at your gym. The profile records the time and leaves out the load on the bar. Men who finish from 2:00 up to 3:00 report a median clean and jerk of 285 lb. Men who finish from 7:00 up report a median of 195 lb, which lines up with the fast times being the 95 lb workout.
How the times are spread
For men, the mean is 4:26 and the median is 3:56. The mean is slower because of a long tail past 7:00. Just over half of the men’s times fall from 2:00 up to 4:00. A 2:59 beats about 75% of the men, a 2:32 beats about 90%, and a 2:21 beats about 95%. Each bar below is one minute, so the 3:00 bar is times from 3:00 up to 4:00.
Show the numbers
| Time | Athletes |
|---|---|
| <2:00 | 50 |
| 2:00 | 6,439 |
| 3:00 | 6,683 |
| 4:00 | 4,888 |
| 5:00 | 3,070 |
| 6:00 | 1,853 |
| 7:00 | 1,092 |
| 8:00 | 622 |
| 9:00 | 373 |
| 10:00 | 186 |
| 11:00 | 100 |
| 12:00+ | 162 |
For women, the mean is 5:32 and the median is 5:09. The times spread wider than the men’s. A little over half fall from 3:00 up to 6:00, and the busiest minute is 4:00 to 5:00. A 3:56 beats about 75% of the women, a 3:05 beats about 90%, and a 2:45 beats about 95%. A good women’s time in this set, 3:56, is the same number as the median men’s time.
Show the numbers
| Time | Athletes |
|---|---|
| <2:00 | 4 |
| 2:00 | 682 |
| 3:00 | 1,440 |
| 4:00 | 1,649 |
| 5:00 | 1,456 |
| 6:00 | 1,085 |
| 7:00 | 676 |
| 8:00 | 426 |
| 9:00 | 279 |
| 10:00 | 135 |
| 11:00 | 81 |
| 12:00+ | 99 |
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 4:00 has beaten 47.7% of the men here. A woman who finishes in 4:00 has beaten 73.0%.
| Time | Men | Women |
|---|---|---|
| 2:00 | 99.7% | 100.0% |
| 2:30 | 90.5% | 97.4% |
| 3:00 | 73.8% | 91.0% |
| 3:30 | 60.8% | 83.3% |
| 4:00 | 47.7% | 73.0% |
| 4:30 | 37.8% | 63.1% |
| 5:00 | 28.6% | 52.3% |
| 5:30 | 22.7% | 43.5% |
| 6:00 | 16.8% | 34.3% |
| 6:30 | 13.2% | 27.0% |
| 7:00 | 9.7% | 20.9% |
| 7:30 | 7.5% | 16.6% |
| 8:00 | 5.5% | 12.4% |
| 8:30 | 4.3% | 9.9% |
| 9:00 | 3.1% | 7.2% |
| 9:30 | 2.4% | 5.5% |
| 10:00 | 1.7% | 3.8% |
Age
The headline numbers mix every age together. A good Fran at 45 is a slower time than a good Fran at 28. In the individual division, ages 18-34, the median is 3:34 for men and 4:53 for women. The time that beats about 75% of that division is 2:48 for men and 3:45 for women. From there the median slows by roughly a minute every five to ten years. In the tables, the count of posted times is in parentheses. The 75th column beats about 75% of that age group, and the 50th column is the median.
Teens barely appear in this scrape, 16 boys and 9 girls with a usable time, so they are left out of the tables. The 60+ women’s row is 36 athletes.
| Age | 75th | 50th |
|---|---|---|
| 18-34 (15,238) | 2:48 | 3:34 |
| 35-39 (4,086) | 3:05 | 4:00 |
| 40-44 (3,284) | 3:35 | 4:34 |
| 45-49 (1,764) | 3:55 | 5:01 |
| 50-54 (697) | 4:33 | 5:47 |
| 55-59 (291) | 4:48 | 6:18 |
| 60+ (142) | 5:46 | 6:58 |
| Age | 75th | 50th |
|---|---|---|
| 18-34 (4,927) | 3:45 | 4:53 |
| 35-39 (1,246) | 3:55 | 5:04 |
| 40-44 (1,003) | 4:18 | 5:28 |
| 45-49 (518) | 4:48 | 6:02 |
| 50-54 (205) | 5:27 | 6:35 |
| 55-59 (68) | 5:46 | 6:54 |
| 60+ (36) | 6:30 | 7:30 |
Predicting a Fran time
Three other numbers on the same profile predict a Fran time pretty well: max clean and jerk, max unbroken pull-ups, and body weight. Among the 15,724 men who posted all three, those inputs account for 67% of the variation in Fran times.
Clean and jerks and body weights posted in kilograms were converted to pounds. For a man at 180 lb, with a 200 lb clean and jerk and 20 unbroken pull-ups, the formula gives 358 seconds, or 5:58.
- Each extra unbroken pull-up is associated with a Fran about 1.1% faster.
- Each extra pound on the clean and jerk is associated with a Fran about 0.5% faster.
- Each extra pound of body weight is associated with a Fran about 0.2% slower.
For the 4,093 women who posted all three, the same inputs account for 68% of the variation.
For a woman at 140 lb, with a 155 lb clean and jerk and 15 unbroken pull-ups, the formula gives 5:45. The associations are about 1.3% faster per extra pull-up, 0.7% faster per extra pound on the clean and jerk, and 0.4% slower per extra pound of body weight.
These associations describe the athletes who posted their numbers. If the goal is a faster Fran, the largest association per extra rep is unbroken pull-ups, then a heavier clean and jerk. Body weight is the smallest of the three.