At the beginning of Spring, I signed up for two races, the half-marathon Dam to Dam in the summer, and the full Des Moines Marathon in October. This was my second half, but I’d never come close to a full marathon, so signing up for it was aspirational motivation. I was training with a group running long on Saturday mornings, so as the time for the half approached and I started thinking about the full, I was feeling more and more confident that I would actually be able to run it. Then I ran the half, and things went wrong.

I was having problems with my lower back, not an uncommon issue, especially for those of us who spend our day staring at a computer screen. My problem was exasperated by my poor posture in my chair. I tend to slouch after a couple of hours, and then slowly slide lower and lower into my chair until, at the last moment before I fall out of it, I reposition myself and sit up again. I also run in the morning, and I rarely have time to stretch properly after a run, a bad habit that needs to be addressed. By the end of the day I’d stand up and crack my lower back three or four times, and know that if I turned in the wrong way I would be out of commission for a week or so while my back untwisted itself.

Apple released ResearchKit as an open source project on GitHub today. The project is complete with pull requests, a wiki, and a few sample projects to get started. While the project is great in its own right, it was the context of this tweet by Daniel Jalkut that caught my eye: