The perfect machine

In the NY Times' Play Magazine, Mark Levine has a great piece about Michael Phelps and the science of swimming. It's all extremely interesting, but here's an especially striking bit about his coach's influence:

Bowman studied music in college and likes to speak of himself in terms of an old-school, authoritarian orchestra conductor, refining the raw gifts of his players. (He has also developed an interest, more recently, in raising thoroughbreds; coaching Phelps, he has remarked, is like training Secretariat.) He started the preteen Phelps on six-days-a-week practice regimens, often making him swim more than once a day, to work systematically on his mechanics, his endurance and his strength. He recognized Phelps’s predisposition to develop gargantuan aerobic capacity and exploited it, ultimately pushing him to swim at least 50 miles each week. He knew that prepubescent children can, through training, increase the size of their hearts and lungs in ways that are no longer possible later on. “The larger the heart and lungs,” he has noted, “the bigger the aerobic engine.” Beginning when Phelps was 12, he worked the swimmer seven days a week, guided by the assumption that competitors who rested on Sundays were at least one-seventh less conditioned. “Michael has a pretty easy life,” he would joke, “if you don’t count the five hours a day of torture I put him through.”