Contributing Editor Layla Parast is aiming for excellence…by being medium-good:
A few years ago, Netflix recommended to me a documentary called “Fittest on Earth: A Decade of Fitness,” which was about the 2017 CrossFit Games. I knew what CrossFit was—it involved running around carrying balls and kettlebells and lots of jumping, and I had no interest in doing it myself, but I watched it. My first thought was—these people are completely insane. But by the end, I was intrigued. I had never seen people who could do so much—running, swimming, lifting heavy weights, gymnastics. I knew people who were fast runners, and they generally could barely lift anything. And I knew people who could lift heavy, and they could barely run 400 meters. I had always thought that there was a tradeoff: you have to choose one and accept that you can’t be good at everything, much like every statistics paper I have written. But CrossFit seemed to be more about being medium-good at everything. And as someone who has never felt very good at any one thing, I was very attracted to the idea of being medium-good at several different things.
I had especially never seen so many powerful women. These women could lift almost twice their bodyweight over their heads, run six-minute miles, and walk across a football field on their hands. After 35 years of having a mindset that “smaller is better” in terms of body image, CrossFit completely changed my attitude. I have tracked my food intake on and off since I was 13 years old. I have a plot of my weight since I was in high school (in R, and smoothed, of course). And I am not abnormal [1,2] (well, maybe just the R part). To instead be introduced to a culture that says it is not about what your body looks like, it is about what your body can do, was an enormous mental shift.
Competing in CrossFit is all about statistics. Every year anyone in the world can participate in the CrossFit Open (https://games.crossfit.com/open/overview), an online competition where you perform three specified workouts where one workout is released each weekend over three weeks and you have three days to complete each workout. You can try as many times as you want within those three days. You have to have someone judge you or record yourself doing it. Once you input your score, you are ranked, either by how fast you did it or how far you got in the workout (or weight lifted), among your fellow competitors. In 2023, over 323,000 people around the world competed in the Open. First place on a workout gets one point, second place gets two points, last place gets 323,000 points. In the end, your total points across the three workouts are summed and the top 10% of competitors overall (lowest scores) move on to the next stage, Quarterfinals. Here, you have five workouts that you have to complete in three days, and they tend to be much harder, heavier, and involve higher-level skills. From here, the top athletes move on to in-person regional Semifinals and finally, the CrossFit Games.
While the athletes who make it to the CrossFit Games are truly exceptional, it is a great achievement to “make the top 10%” alone, qualifying from the Open to Quarterfinals. A common question that comes up is, given that I finished in the Xth percentile on the first workout and the Yth percentile on the second workout, where do I need to finish in the third workout to make the top 10%? This turns out to be quite a hard question. This season I made a Shiny app for some friends (and myself) to try to answer that question [https://laylaparast.shinyapps.io/CFopen/]. First of all, you could simply find the Z such that the average of X, Y, and Z is at the 90th percentile. But that’s not quite right because it really depends on how the people above you and below you on the first and second workout moved. Let’s say you are at the 90th percentile for the first and second workout. One might say you are then at the 90th percentile overall after those two workouts. But if everyone who finished better than you on the first workout then finished worse than you on the second workout, you will be higher than 90th. Your ending percentile depends on how everyone else does around you. Now, we can imagine that the distribution of other people’s scores around you from workout to workout is uniform, but this is an incorrect assumption because competitors in the top 1–2% will pretty much always be in the top 1–2% in every workout. Similarly, people in the bottom 20–50% will likely be there in every workout. I ended up calculating this assuming that the top 1% are always the top 1% in every workout and that the people who finish above you in a workout also finished above you in past workouts, though their ordering above you is uniformly distributed. It becomes even more interesting when CrossFit surprisingly announces that one workout will have two scores, resulting in four (not three) equally weighted scores, which happened this year.
However, for the vast majority of people who do CrossFit, it is not about competing. Lessons I’ve learned from CrossFit have surprisingly translated to lessons that have been helpful for my career. In my first few CrossFit classes, I was incredibly humbled by how good everyone else was and I could not imagine that I could ever in my life be able to do those things (like walk on my hands). This is very much how I felt in graduate school, humbled by not just the intelligent professors, but my peers as well. But little by little, you learn, you practice, you put in the effort, you get advice and support from others, and you see results. At some point you find that other people look up to you the same way you looked up to others. The tricky part comes when you compare yourself to others (which is, of course, the definition of competing). If you define your self-worth based on your success, and your success is defined by comparing yourself and your achievements to others, you have a recipe for potential disaster. As the saying goes, comparison is the thief of joy—and how true that is. What I have learned is that almost nothing good comes from comparing yourself to others. I never feel better after comparing my CV to someone else, comparing my number of papers, grants, awards, to someone else. This is not what success is. It’s about asking myself, have I done my best within the parameters of my life and what I value in my life? Could I publish more papers? Maybe, but not while trying to also spend time with my family and friends. Could I get more grants? Maybe (probably not), but it’s not about getting a grant and putting it on your CV, it’s about what a grant allows you to do—work on something you are passionate about, support students, train researchers, contribute in a meaningful way to a field. As non-flashy as it sounds, CrossFit has taught me that you can be excellent by being medium-good at several different things, and that, unlike the Open, my self-worth is not determined by the achievements of others.
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1 Neumark-Sztainer, D., Wall, M., Larson, N. I., Eisenberg, M. E., & Loth, K. (2011). Dieting and disordered eating behaviors from adolescence to young adulthood: findings from a 10-year longitudinal study. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 111(7), 1004–1011.
2 Neumark-Sztainer, D., & Hannan, P. J. (2000). Weight-related behaviors among adolescent girls and boys: results from a national survey. Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 154(6), 569–577.