What’s a good Helen (CrossFit) time?

A good Helen is 8:21 for men and 9:32 for women. A great Helen is 7:44 for men and 8:44 for women. A good time beats about 75% of the people who posted a Helen on a CrossFit Games profile, and a great time beats about 90%. The median is 9:18 for men and 10:44 for women.

Helen is three rounds for time of a 400m run, 21 kettlebell swings, and 12 pull-ups. Men swing 53 lb. Women swing 35 lb. The pull-ups can be kipping.

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, 15,060 men and 4,804 women had typed in a Helen. I kept times from 6:00 to 20:00, which leaves 14,834 men and 4,718 women. The other entries include times under 6 minutes and times past 20 minutes.

An earlier version of this post used 573 athletes, 448 men and 125 women, from a smaller 2014 scrape, described in Gathering CrossFit data: the methodology. The times below replace those. What moves a Helen, pull-ups against the run, is in How do I improve my Helen (CrossFit) time?.

About 25% of the men and 14% of the women on these profiles posted a Helen. 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 kettlebell. Men who finish from 6:00 up to 8:00 report a median of 50 unbroken pull-ups. Men who finish from 12:00 up to 15:00 report a median of 21, which lines up with the fast times being the 53 lb workout.

How the times are spread

For men, the mean is 9:40 and the median is 9:18. The mean is slower because of a tail past 12:00. About four in five men finish from 7:00 up to 11:00, and the busiest minute is 8:00 to 9:00. An 8:21 beats about 75% of the men, a 7:44 beats about 90%, and a 7:26 beats about 95%. Each bar below is one minute, so the 8:00 bar is 8:00 up to 9:00. The last bar is 13:00 on.

For women, the mean is 11:04 and the median is 10:44. The busiest minute is 9:00 to 10:00. A 9:32 beats about 75% of the women, an 8:44 beats about 90%, and an 8:17 beats about 95%. At the median, the women are about 15% slower than the men, 10:44 against 9:18. The first bar is every time under 8:00. Each bar after that is one minute, and the last is 14:00 on.

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 9:00 has beaten 56.7% of the men here. A woman who finishes in 9:00 has beaten 85.1%.

An 8:00 is a good men’s time and a great women’s time: it beats 82.9% of the men and 97.2% of the women. A 12:00 beats 10.6% of the men and 27.6% of the women.

Age

The headline numbers mix every age. In the individual division, ages 18-34, the median is 8:55 for men and 10:31 for women. The time that beats about 75% of that division is 8:04 for men and 9:24 for women. Men’s medians then slow by about 20 to 30 seconds every five years through the 50s, and the 60+ median is 11:28. Women’s medians stay between 10:31 and 10:50 from 18-34 through 40-44, then move to 11:29 at 45-49 and 11:32 at 50-54. The men’s rows run from 7,273 athletes aged 18-34 to 98 aged 60+. The women’s rows run from 2,413 to 150 at ages 50-54. Teens are barely in the scrape. The 55-59 women’s row is 53 athletes, and the 60+ row is 35, so those groups are left out. The 75th column beats about 75% of that age group, and the 50th column is the median.