But it can also be very hard, particularly when one or both is not going particularly well. This is especially so because exam time invariably coincides with a vital training and early season period for most summer sports-people.

I was reminded of this recently when speaking to a friend, Jordan Frapwell, locked in the midst of final year university exams alongside training for an international sporting event. His example provides a classic case of the obstacles aspiring athletes face if they are to reach the summit of their sport.

A good but by no means great runner who, dare I say it, on a particularly bad day would sometimes struggle to drop me in a session, Frapwell started focusing on triathlon training while at university in Cardiff.

After only beginning dedicated training in September 2012, which included swimming competitively for the first time, he enjoyed a remarkable 12-month period in which he qualified for the World and European Sprint Championships in his 20 to 24 age group, and then finished 16th at the former in Hyde Park two days before Spaniard Javier Gómez outsprinted Briton Jonny Brownlee to win the senior men's world title.

Jordan Frapwell has struggled with the demands of final year university studies this year ©Facebook



But as for most athletes, the challenge for Frapwell has come since, as the effortless success he enjoyed in his opening season has proved harder to come by. Final year studies have added to the difficulty, especially because he has been faced with every student's nightmare of a timetable awash with 9am lectures, hardly ideal when combined with early morning swimming.

"After the World Championships, I went back into freshers week and let my hair down for a while," he told insidethegames. "But then when I got back into training, it was really tough. I had to be up at 5am, in the water for an hour a half at 6.30am, and then straight on to a train in time for lectures.

"I would then work all day before doing a run, bike or gym session in the evening. I would feel so tired I could barely pick up a cup of coffee after training, and this would make it harder to work well afterwards."

He added that it was "particularly tough because mentally he had switched off", and because all he had thought about was preparing for the World Championships, it "was hard to re-focus afterwards".

Unsurprisingly, with training performances not as good as before, this made it even harder to find motivation for the early-morning starts, and eventually the decision was made to prioritise university commitments and cut down on training a little.

To find an example of a young athlete who has overcome adversity, as good an example as any, and certainly for someone based in Cardiff, is Welsh footballer Aaron Ramsey, who scored the winning goal as Arsenal won the English FA Cup to end a nine-year trophy drought this weekend.

Signed from Cardiff City in 2008, Ramsey was hailed as the next big thing in English football, only for a horrifying leg break in early 2010 to rule him out of Arsenal action for over a year. When he returned he failed to deliver on his earlier promise, and was criticised by fans for not being good enough to compete at the highest level.

But with a full pre season behind him, he has been a completely different player this time around, and if it was not for another injury in the New Year he may have been able to propel Arsenal to more than one trophy this season.

Aaron Ramsey is a good example of a young athlete who has overcome adversity to return to the highest level ©Getty Images



Another athlete who has juggled studying and sport is sprinter Adam Gemili, who finished a superb fifth at the 2013 World Championships in Moscow over 200 metres at the same time as studying sports and exercise science with human biology at the University of East London.

Gemili is, however, missing from the Great Britain team for the inaugural International Association of Athletics Federations World Relays in Nassau next weekend (May 24 to 25) due to university exams.

And I was pleased to see that, despite his setbacks, Frapwell remains confident he will follow the success of these two and regain top form.

He has been keeping training "ticking over" during the exam period, and will then have six weeks to prepare for the European Championships in Kitzbühel, Austria from June 19 to 22, where a top 10 finish remains on the cards.

After that he is hoping to move up in distance to the even-more gruelling half-Ironman discipline, with a move to Australia or New Zealand also a possibility to take advantage of warmer climates. 

So the lesson here is twofold. For a youngster, reaching the top of a sport is not easy and the balance with studies is difficult, but neither should anyone abandon hope when the going gets tough, as one setback does not mean chances of long-term success are over. Administrators meanwhile, should take on board the challenges and try and find means to combine the two, as is already done under the US collegiate system and elsewhere.

The great thing is that, although there is greater pressure than ever before, there are also greater opportunities in terms of sport and studying. And it can be said with a degree of confidence that we will see more and more juggling of the two in the future.