“You could say Zane Grothe is a professional distance swimmer. You could also say he is an aspiring rocket scientist. Pursuing both the Olympics and a master’s degree in aerospace engineering—the hardest that it gets for sport and science—Grothe is innately pulled to what others think is hard.”

“Grothe says he thought about “how it would be to have the tag ‘professional athlete, rocket scientist’,” even though he knew how difficult it would be. Just like that 25m fly race, he figured if he did the work no one else dared to do, he could be successful.”