Madisyn Cox’s Olympic dream could soon come true. Her med school dream is on deck either way.

“All these questions were running through my head,” Cox, 26, recalled recently. “But ultimately, I thought, ‘This is my last chance at going for the Olympics.’ I couldn’t one day turn around and say, ‘Oh, I’m going to go back to training.’ Our bodies are primed at a certain time, and I can’t go back at 40 and decide I want to do this. But I can always push medical school back a year. So I decided to go that route.”