Main Takeaways
- $97,524 in leaderboard swings under P-Score — Justin Medeiros “over-earned” while Roman and Sprague lost.
- Colten Mertens’ dominance
- Justin’s edge isn’t dominance — it’s timing.
- Olivia Kerstetter jumps to the podium,
- Programming problems
What is P-Score?
P-Score is a performance-based scoring system that replaces placements with proportional performance.
Instead of assigning points by order of finish, it measures how much better or worse an athlete performs compared to the rest of the field.
If someone wins by two minutes, they earn two minutes worth of separation — not just a flat 100 points.
If a workout is tightly packed, everyone scores closer together.
The result? A system that rewards dominance, penalizes narrow escapes, and paints a more honest picture of who was actually fittest across the weekend.
For a full P-Score leaderboard, check out this Google doc.
Here are my key findings for the weekend.
Men’s Division
Colten Mertens: The Outlier
In Event 3, Tax Collector, Colten Mertens demolished the field. Under Rogue scoring, Justin Medeiros earned 95 points for second, but under P-Score he’d receive just 74.3 points.
Colten was nearly two minutes ahead of Justin — in a workout where almost everyone else finished within a 3-minute-30-second window, and the average spread between athletes was only 27 seconds. That’s not just winning — that’s erasing the field.
Likewise, in Event 8, Double Bogey, Colten again took first. Harry Lightfoot followed with 77.6 points in P-Score. The spread was razor-thin — about 1.1 seconds per point — and no other athlete broke six minutes.
Even with two massive P-Score performances, Colten still would’ve finished 9th overall, mirroring his actual placement. That’s because his low points in Events 4, 5, and 7 weighed heavily — illustrating how P-Score punishes inconsistency more than traditional scoring.
Leaderboard Shake-Up
The men’s podium looks very different under P-Score.
- Justin Medeiros drops from 2nd → 4th
- Roman Khrennikov moves from 3rd → 2nd
- James Sprague jumps from 4th → 3rd
The real story isn’t the shuffle — it’s why it happens.
Justin Medeiros thrives in pile-ups — he’s often just slightly ahead of large clusters of athletes. In standard scoring, that rewards him heavily. Under P-Score, it doesn’t.
- Event 1: +14 points under P-Score
- Event 3: 95 → 74.3 points
- Event 7: 85 → 66.1 points
- Event 8: 80 → 67.3 points
- Event 9: 70 → 56.7 points
He’s edging his peers — not out-performing them by large margins. It’s the game he’s winning, not necessarily the fitness test.
Roman Khrennikov, by contrast, was often on the wrong side of those clusters. Under P-Score, he’d gain ground — particularly in the final — picking up +8 points there.
When you add it all up:
- Justin: 605 P-Score points (down from 685)
- Roman: 632 P-Score points (down from 665)
That’s a massive earnings swing.
- Sprague lost $10,836
- Roman lost $37,926.39
- Justin gained $48,762 too much under traditional scoring.
Women’s Division
Podium Shake-Up
One of the biggest surprises came when Olivia Kerstetter jumped from 5th to 3rd under P-Score, bumping Lucy Campbell to 4th.
Olivia’s P-Score line stayed relatively flat — steady, consistent performances. Lucy, however, took major hits early:
- Event 1: –26 points, scoring just 4.8
- Event 6: 12 points
Those dips cratered her total, showing how small performance margins matter enormously under P-Score.
Programming and the Women’s Field
The women’s competition revealed something deeper about programming balance. Normally, one or two athletes might take negative scores in an event due to a weakness or injury. But in Event 2, eight women — nearly 40% of the field — went negative. That’s an alarming rate and signals a programming issue, not athlete failure.
When I first saw this, I thought I’d miscalculated. I double-checked. The math was right — the event wasn’t. The log’s size and mass clearly disadvantaged the women’s field. When implements get odd, mass matters more than mechanics.
So I looked across all events. In the women’s field, the number of athletes who received negative scores per event was:
5, 8, 5, 1, 0, 4, 1, 2, and 4 — a total of 30 negative scores.
For the men? Just 13 total.
That discrepancy is telling. Rogue’s programming often celebrates skill and load for the men but doesn’t seem to calibrate fairly for the women. It favors the larger athlete — and it shows. So maybe John Young has a point…. Caity.
Final Take
P-Score doesn’t just change the leaderboard — it exposes what the leaderboard hides.
At Rogue, it highlights the narrow fitness margins that separate the men’s podium, the massive outlier performances from Colten Mertens, and a programming imbalance that penalized the women’s field disproportionately.
The takeaway?
Traditional scoring rewards placement.
P-Score rewards performance.
And that difference — at Rogue — was worth nearly $100,000.
