A metaphor aims to illustrate a specific point better. It does not aim to be a full equivalent of the thing itself. This does not only apply to sports metaphors

A metaphor aims to illustrate a specific point better. It does not aim to be a full equivalent of the thing itself. This does not only apply to sports metaphors. Sports metaphors are common because the are usually easy to grasp. And I think in this specific case it makes a ton of things to not pick any metaphor, but an endurance run as opposed to … a sprint, which is currently THE most common (albeit only implicitly used)sports metaphor in the software engineering industry.