Will Fatigue Be a Factor at Friday Night Lights During the 2024 CrossFit Games? A Preview and Some Predictions

Last week, Morning Chalk Up managing editor Joe Genetin-Pilawa and I sat down with Chris Hinshaw, founder of Aerobic Capacity, to chat about some of the running-related events already announced for the 2024 CrossFit Games. 

• “I think that this combination, what Dave did, it’s outstanding. I mean, people are sitting there going, ‘Why so much running?’” Hinshaw said. “Because the three and a half miles, let’s just say it is, that is a different stimulus. The speed endurance, or let’s call it strength endurance/odd object, different stimulus. The mile, different.” 

They’re all different, Hinshaw concluded, but if an athlete is truly aerobically balanced, they should be able to earn the most points out of all three. 

• “And that, to me, is awesome,” Hinshaw said with a grin.

Previewing the “Friday Night Lights” Event

We honed in on the “Friday Night Lights” (FNL) event — Individual Event 6: Track and Field, presented by Rogue Fitness — under the lights at Farrington Field.

• We wondered if we could use data from the 2021 CrossFit Games to make some predictions and, ultimately, some conclusions about elite athletes’ training and performance. And what we learned was so much more. 

Hinshaw loves this event. 

• “It’s genuinely brilliant,” he said. “If people don’t appreciate it, it’s because they’re naive. It’s brilliant in the way in which it’s going to force athletes and coaches to make a decision.”

That decision for the athletes and their coaches comes down to the two-part programming of the event. 

Do you go all out on the field sprint because of a slower mile time? 

Do you “sandbag” the mile time trial to focus on the field sprint? 

Do you even get to make the choice yourself? 

Some athletes won’t have much of a choice by Event 6, halfway through the competition weekend. 

• They may find themselves in a position where they have to sprint the mile, try to recover, run hard again, or be in jeopardy of being on the cutline going into “Event 7: Chad 1000X.” After this event, the field will be decreased to 30.

When the event was first announced, before we talked with Hinshaw, I already started compiling the data.

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Remind me: While the times from 2021 may be three years old, they give us a look into assessing athletes running performance during a Games weekend. 

• The 550-yard run (roughly 502 meters) was the third event on Day 1 in 2021, after a one-mile swim with fins and a three-mile paddle and then a sled, pig flip, and muscle-up workout. 

The water event was over an hour for all athletes, around 1:10:00–1:15:00 for the men and similar with the women, with one or two exceptions. Seungyeon Choi’s time was 1:43:14. Then, the Sled/Pig/Muscle-Up event was around eight minutes for the best, with a range of athletes sub-eight minutes to the time cap. 

Most men finished the event, and only 20 of the 37 competing women finished.

• Thirty minutes after the completion of Event 2, athletes took on Event 3, the 550-yard sprint. 

The 1600-meter run is Individual Event 6, about a day and a half further into the weekend. Still, after a good amount of fatigue, it can help compare what was done in 2021 vs. what may be done this year.

The nearly three-hour gap between the end of Individual Event 5 and the start of Event 6 will give the athletes a bit of recoverability before the all-out 1600-meter track run.

We focused on this 2021 sprint event because we have tools and data to help preview and predict Friday night at Farrington Field.

What Can We Predict?

A few years ago, Chris Hinshaw was on the Brute Strength podcast on the subject of “why your endurance sucks and how to fix it.” This is a subject that Hinshaw understands at the highest level, working with Jason Khalipa, Rich Froning, and Jeff Adler, to name a few.

On that podcast, Hinshaw mentioned a formula created by Peter Riegel for “Race Time Predictions” for runners, which was published in Runner’s World in 1977.

Here is the formula:

t2 = t1 * (d2 / d1)^1.06

Another way to look at it: Time 2 = Time 1 multiplied by (Distance 2 / Distance 1) ^1.06

• In this case, “Time 2” would be an estimated 1600-meter time, which is what we are trying to get a gauge on for Friday night’s event.

An important note: This is kind of in the weeds, but bear with me. In the above equation, the number “1.06” is a fatigue factor number used when comparing a 400-meter run against the same athlete’s 1600-meter effort.

• To be clear, 1.06 is for elite endurance runners, not elite CrossFitters. Elite CrossFit athletes who are skilled in endurance training would be around “1.215,” and per Hinshaw, that’s not even something Rich Froning could maintain when they first started working together.

Hinshaw said, “When I started coaching Rich Froning at the end of 2014, he had a 400-meter time of 60 seconds and a mile time of 6:00. His fatigue was 28.7%. At 21.5% FF, his optimal mile time should have been ~5:22. This is why Froning walked in Triple 3. In the three months of working together, his mile dropped to 5:41, and after six months, it dropped to 5:24.”  

The data: Here are the 2024 Games athletes, both men and women, who ran the 550-yard sprint in 2021 with their estimated 1600-meter time based on the calculations above. For the calculation, we gave the athletes the benefit and used the 1.215 / 21.5% fatigue factor.

These charts include 29 of the 79 2024 CrossFit Games athletes in the total field:

Men (17 Total)

Women (12 Total)

Let’s zoom in on a few of these and show the math for Gui Malheiros.

Malheiros’ estimated 1600-meter run time = 01:15.4 * (1600 / 502)^1.215 = 0:05:08

• Given the place of both events during the weekend, Hinshaw suggested a range of plus or minus 10-12 seconds to the athletes’ times which would put Malheiros around 4:58 to 5:20. 

But that’s only if Malheiros’ fatigue number is 21.5%. Rich Froning’s originally was 28.7%. 

More on that in a minute.

Looking at the chart above, you may see that Jeffrey Adler’s estimated mile time is 0:05:23 and think, didn’t he just tell Dave Castro he ran a sub-five-minute mile? 

Yes, he did, actually. 

Hinshaw was there and told his side of the story:

• “When I was in Montreal with [Jeff Adler], his workout was [a paced] 500-meter run in 1:45, a minute of rest, another 500 meters at 1:45, two minutes of rest. He did that twice and programmed in was 1600 meters in 4:55 to 4:57. It was just in a workout, so he rested two minutes at the the end of that 500-meter run and just went straight into it and went 4:56.”

That’s what makes this event interesting — we get to see who identified and attacked their running weaknesses in the last three years. 

• Adler had a 19th-place finish in the 550-yard sprint in 2021, but he will no doubt place higher in Event 6 on Friday.

Hinshaw framed it this way: “Here’s what they did back in the day, and did they learn anything from that? Did they put into action and fix, yeah, their weaknesses?” 

• He went on to say, “So it should be the same, right, relatively? But, what you’re going to find is that athletes are grossly slower [in the 1600m run] than that because  [some athletes are] never going to do whatever you’ve calculated with the math, it’s going to be [much slower] which tells you that that athlete hasn’t been focusing on what that athlete should be focusing on and that’s what I look at, it tells me the competency of the athlete and coach that they’re working with if they’re not fixing what they should.”

The Fatigue Factor

The prescribed rest period makes the event on Friday night especially interesting.

• Rest isn’t just rest. The rest in this event is a crucial part of the event itself. The rest is where the next level, the Fittest on Earth, will shine. 

As Hinshaw described it, “[rest duration] doesn’t matter for an elite athlete that knows their protocol. If you said to an athlete, you get one minute of rest, 30 seconds of rest, three minutes of rest, 10 minutes of rest. He has his protocols. And they’ve trained it, and that’s where they have an advantage. It’s not like they’re just freestyling. There is a protocol that they precisely do to put them in the best position going into the next interval.” 

• The rest is going to make or break many athletes in this workout, and it will likely go unnoticed.

We will be watching Friday Night alongside Hinshaw at Farrington Field, not just for who has the fastest time but who exceeds expectations, who has the best rest protocols to reduce their heart rate and get their cardio/respiratory fatigue under control, and who, after three years, still hasn’t worked on their weaknesses. 

This is part one. Look for part two after the Games, where we jump into the numbers further with Hinshaw to assess the curve created when we know an athlete’s 500-meter pace, 1600-meter pace, and 3.5-5K pace.

More 2024 CrossFit Games Coverage

• Will Any CrossFit Games Rookies Finish in the Top 10 in 2024?
• 5 CrossFit Games Storylines You Should Pay Attention To
• Will One of These 3 Veteran Women Finally Get to the CrossFit Games Podium This Summer?

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