Not exactly. In football / basketball, so much depends on chance, your team, your opponents, the referee etc. You can work more / better and still end up with

Not exactly. In football / basketball, so much depends on chance, your team, your opponents, the referee etc. You can work more / better and still end up with worse results. Or vice versa. In running, you mostly compete against yourself (unless you are a top athlete, but that's another story). You set your goals, you work to achieve them and it depends only on you. So yeah, grit , determination or however you call it, will make you progress, and you can measure it with an easy objective function (your time vs your past times, distance).