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In response to Rick Roth's answer to my other question.

Should we merge Running into Exercise and Fitness? I can see arguments both ways. There certainly are a lot of questions specific to long distance running, conditioning for races, etc. However, In the short term though as budding sites, they do seem like they would sap contributors from each other and probably divide a budding community of those of us who like to stay in shape. In the short term it seems that maybe "running" is really a tag in "Exercise and Fitness"

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I say close up 'Running'.

As much as people like narrow proposals, I believe that they are much less likely to survive a lack-luster beta phase.

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  • I wouldn't find a beta phase "embarrassing". The whole point of a beta is to ascertain whether the topic is viable to be its own category. Your assumption is that running would fail the beta. Instead of making guesses, let's wait for the beta and find out (I'm not saying it won't fail; I just think it should be given the opportunity).
    – Nick
    Feb 7, 2011 at 20:36
  • @Nick - Larger, more viable, proposals may never make it off the ground if the audience is overly subdivided among other proposals. I would consider this to be a viable proposal, if we already had some kind of successful sports or exercise proposal. But at this point, I think this proposal is just hurting other proposals. (Also I removed embarrassing from my answer to tone it down a notch)
    – Mark Rogers
    Feb 7, 2011 at 20:45
  • I can see it both ways as well, but tend to agree that the broader topic will attract a larger user base--which should be the first goal. As the site grows it might then be appropriate to splinter off sub topics like Running.
    – RunnerRick
    Feb 19, 2011 at 6:42
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Fitness & Nutrition has been up for almost month now and has 36 questions out of 309 in total. After the rather generic tag, it's by far the largest tag on the site.

I personally find statements like:

you would get a lot of amateur answers to questions that require more experience

or

I probably wouldn't bother with a more general site

to be very much against the spirit of Stack Exchange. If you're an expert: prove it! The votes will show everyone who gives the best answers. Furthermore, we try to enforce 'Back-it-up!' on answers, which should help to prevent amateurs from answering without preparation.

A lot of our users don't perform just one type of exercise. They might be doing weightlifting or martial arts, but they also run or do some cardio. Just as lot of people on a diet take up jogging as their main source of exercise to lose weight. There's so much cohesion between types of exercises and related topics that I don't see why they have to be separated.

The only thing that counts is that runners get great answers to their questions and that the running-experts have questions to answer. So simply put, the site you're looking for already exists and there's no reason not to start asking questions!

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I say running should be kept as its own separate topic. The reason I run is neither for exercise nor fitness. I run competitively, and were running to be merged into "Exercise and Fitness", you would get a lot of amateur answers to questions that require more experience.

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    Nick has a very good point here and one which shouldn't be underestimated. I probably wouldn't bother with a more general site.
    – pjmorse
    Feb 7, 2011 at 23:04
  • +1 to nick and pjmorse.
    – amol
    Feb 8, 2011 at 18:13
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    Is there a competitive sports SE yet? Seems like running would belong there.
    – JYelton
    Feb 8, 2011 at 21:37
  • I agree with this answer. But... I also agree with JYelton's comment, Running is a bit specialized to be it's own site, I think. What about all the other sports / activities that people do competitively, but not primarily for exercise?
    – CrazyPenguin
    Feb 10, 2011 at 21:35
  • According to Cubestat, Milesplit.us gets 414,079 page views a day. Runner's World gets 98,552. Letsrun.com gets 34,980. I would hardly describe these stats as those of a specialized topic.
    – Nick
    Feb 14, 2011 at 1:42
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    It seems to me the solution to this is to write a better question!
    – Goodbye Stack Exchange
    Feb 14, 2011 at 5:33
  • I run because I love running and racing is fun. I would be less interested in an "Exercise and Fisness" Q&A site as would many of the runners I know. This would be like merging stackoverflow and superuser.
    – Lance Fisher
    Mar 8, 2011 at 23:31

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