Paul Schneider and Robert Smith are PhD students in the Wellcome Trust DTC for Public Health, Economics & Decision Science. They found their first-year research attachment with ‘parkrun UK’ so interesting, they continued to work on it even after they moved on to their PhD research. They tell us more about their work with the organisation that has encouraged thousands of people across the UK to take up the weekly challenge of a 5km run or walk.This case study focuses on their approach to open research using open access publications, open data and open source code.