Michael Phelps goes with the flow

BEIJING (Reuters) - For a man who performs extraordinary exploits in the pool, and who could take a record haul of golds in Beijing, Michael Phelps is having a remarkably ordinary time.

The American, who could become the first athlete to win eight golds in a single Games and the most titled Olympian ever, has hardly been feeding on his fame since he arrived in the Chinese capital.

Asked on Thursday what he had been up to in the athletes' village, Phelps shrugged.

"Nothing. We've been sitting in the room playing spades (cards) or I've been watching movies or TV shows on my computer and that's about it," he told reporters.

"I never really leave our little apartment area. I just try to go with the flow, that's pretty much all I can do. I'm here having fun, doing what I love and what I want to do."

While tennis world number one Roger Federer and the NBA-studded U.S. basketball team have been surrounded by admirers, Phelps has been relatively untroubled.

"I was sitting in the dining hall the other day and Federer was in there and he just got swarmed," said the man who stands to dominate the Games if he shatters compatriot Mark Spitz's 1972 record.

"Some of the basketball guys were in there last night and we had a chance to meet them and hang out with them for a bit and they got swarmed too. I've been fine. A few pictures here and there but nothing major."

PRACTICE, PRACTICE

Phelps won six golds at the 2004 Athens Olympics, seven at the last world championships. He has a string of records to his name.

But while many might envy the 23-year-old for his records and extraordinary success, few would envy the workload. Hours of practice, practice and still some more practice has been his daily diet.

Famed for his laser-like focus, and with a pre-race routine honed over a decade of competition, Phelps is an obsessive determined to win and make his sport as popular in North America as it is in swim-crazy Australia.

In a 2004 autobiography 'Beneath the Surface', he revealed how he averaged 75km a week in training and had probably taken no more than four days off in the four years leading up to Athens, none of them holidays.

"There are times in my sleep when I literally dream my race from start to finish," he wrote.

"Other nights, when I'm about to fall asleep, I visualize to the point that I know exactly what I want to do: dive, glide, stroke, flip, reach the wall, hit the split time to the hundredth, then swim back again for as many times as I need to finish the race."

The Baltimore swimmer, who was teased in school and raised by his schoolteacher mother after his parents divorced when he was seven, has acquired a surrogate father figure along the way in coach Bob Bowman.

It was Bowman who taught Phelps to drive, who helped him with his tie when he went to his first school dance and who guided him to Sydney in 2000 where at the age of 15 Phelps became the youngest American male to swim at an Olympics in 68 years.

Phelps grew up in Athens four years later and now he is enjoying the role of experienced elder, even if team mate Dara Torres is old enough to be his mother at 41.

In Beijing, he said the athletes' village allowed him to experience the sort of student dormitory life that he had hitherto missed out on but he would not have lived his life differently.

"I haven't missed out on anything," he said.

"Everything that I have missed, I can do down the road and I am having the opportunity that probably not many 23-year-old kids have had. I am loving every minute of it and just taking it step by step."

(Editing by Steve Ginsburg)