LEDECKY QUICKLY CAME to terms with the unvarying schedule not uncommon for elite swimmers. But beating the clock in distance swimming, as she has, requires enduring tedium few athletes experience. Hour after hour, a swimmer sees little but the black lane line on the bottom of a pool, hears little other than innermost thoughts and the muffled sound of a coach demanding more effort.

The 4:05 a.m. wake-ups; the 20-minute predawn drives to the pool with one of her parents; the two pieces of toast with peanut butter and a banana she uses as fuel for 4 miles of swimming in 90 minutes beginning at 5 a.m.; the chocolate milk immediately after practice; the bacon-cheese-tomato omelet she eats in the car on the way home, a breakfast her mother has ordered so frequently from the same local restaurant, Ize's, that its owners have named it Katie's Gold Medal Omelet; then swim another 5 miles in the afternoon after school.

Day after day, year after year.

"I don't think it's monotonous," Ledecky said, "because Bruce does a great job of mixing up the workouts, and it's a very competitive training atmosphere every day."

Gemmell, 55, who has a perpetually wry expression, gave up a 15-year career as a mechanical engineer to coach swimming. He took over as head coach at Nation's Capital after Suguiyama moved to Cal-Berkeley as an assistant coach two months after the 2012 Olympics. Gemmell insists that there was no anxiety in suddenly being in charge of an Olympic champion whom his Michigan mentor, Jon Urbanchek, had raved about. The timing also worked in his favor.

"With the Olympic cycle, everything is a little down right afterwards, so there was no immediate pressure for her to perform," Gemmell said.

Except Ledecky always wants to perform, especially in practice. To her, being very competitive means training with men and giving them no quarter. Other elite female swimmers, going back to Meyer, have flourished in similar environments where they held their own or more against men. Meyer's measuring stick was Mike Burton, the 1,500-meter Olympic champion in 1968 and 1972.

"I used to race Mike in practice all the time," Meyer said. "I wanted to beat him. I see that in Katie -- the challenging, the wanting to work hard all the time, the pushing yourself every day."

Yet what Ledecky does against some of the top male swimmers in the United States leaves many awestruck.

Before going to a late winter training camp at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where Ledecky also would be present, Olympic gold-medal freestyler Conor Dwyer may or may not have been joking when he said, "I'm a little worried. I don't want to be getting my butt kicked by a 19-year-old girl."

Michael Phelps, the greatest swimmer in history, has gone to several of those OTC camps at the same time as Ledecky. He swears the stories of her taking down the men there are true. "She'll literally beat all the guys in the workout, and it looks like it's nothing, like she is barely breathing," Phelps said.

No one suggests she could win races against top men. But there are beatdowns in practice, especially if she senses the guys are struggling, and she shifts into predator mode.

"You see that in high-level competitors," Phelps said. "If there's an ounce of blood in the water, they're going to try to destroy you as much as they can."

Ledecky's brother, Michael, who was a top-10 finisher in the 100-yard freestyle at the National Catholic High School Championships, was one of her first prey. She began beating him occasionally when she was 11, and he was 14. The key thing is Katie never was afraid to try, and there never was a question of hurting some guy's feelings.

"I never really pay attention to their emotions," she said. "I try not to let that get to me at all. I know it can be hard on them. I take it just as hard if they beat me."

That pitiless attitude is a stark contrast from the relentless generosity that seems to mark the rest of her life. "In the water, she is a stone-cold racer," Suguiyama said. "Out of the water, she is as sweet as she can be."

From signing autographs and taking selfies with kids to visiting wounded warriors at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, to the appreciative look and thank-you she gave Gemmell after setting her first world record in 2013, Ledecky also impresses friends, rivals and strangers out of the pool.

"Katie Ledecky is the student that takes 20 credits a semester at Harvard and gets a 4.0 every semester -- and nobody likes that person," said Elizabeth Beisel, a 2012 Olympic silver and bronze medalist. "But everybody loves Katie Ledecky. You just love to love Katie."

"So calm, so reserved, so humble," teammate DiRado said. "She's a goofy, sweet, smart girl."

She keeps the goofy side for good friends and teammates. She is close to sprinter Simone Manuel, who is as outgoing as Ledecky is reserved. Before the 1,500 final at the 2013 worlds, Ledecky laughed herself nearly silly as Manuel danced around the team room. That could happen again in Rio, where the 20-year-old Manuel, soon to be Ledecky's Stanford teammate, earned spots in the 50 and 100 freestyles.

"We dance together, we sing together, and I think it just kind of keeps her relaxed and reminds her to just have fun -- no pressure, you're a good swimmer, just go fast," Manuel said.

Ledecky's imitation of teammate Tyler Clary in the rookie skits at the 2012 Olympic training camp is said to have made her, at barely 15, the star of the show.

Those kinds of moments have helped persuade Ledecky to resist the temptation of becoming awash in money, which would abolish her college eligibility. Her intention now is to use all four years at Stanford. Being part of a team means a lot to her.

Still, it's not pocket change we are talking about here. When asked about Ledecky's earning potential leading up to the Rio Games, Olympic sports marketing expert Bob Dorfman of Baker Street Advertising told ESPN.com after Ledecky's performance at the 2015 worlds that she could make up to $4 million before the Games if she turned pro. After her performances at the U.S. trials, he upped the ante.

"With a strong shot at four golds, Ledecky would be the aquatic darling of the Games and could command as much as $5 million annually in endorsement income by turning pro -- especially given that at just age 19, she has the opportunity to win gold in two, or even three more Olympic games and could become the female Michael Phelps," Dorfman said in an email. "Obviously the challenge is maintaining high visibility during non-Olympic years, but with her personality and likability, combined with the ever-growing influence of social media, the potential for longer-term deals is there."

That Ledecky has replaced London Olympic darling Missy Franklin as the face of U.S. women's swimming was evident at trials. On the front of Omaha's CenturyLink Center were two four-story-high photo murals. One was of Phelps. The other was of Ledecky.

"I took a selfie with it," she said. "Yeah, it's cool." But you won't find the selfie on her Twitter, Instagram or Facebook feeds.

Time magazine named her one of its 100 Most Influential People of 2016, a list that also included Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Stephen Curry, Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel. Vogue magazine featured her with photographs by Annie Leibovitz. The Washington Post has what is essentially a Ledecky beat.

"I try not to pay attention to all the attention," Ledecky said.

Agents have approached her parents via USA Swimming. The reply has been a polite "no."

"It's never something that has entered my mind or I really want to pursue at this moment," Katie said. "I want to go to college, get my education and swim in college. I'm not concerned about money at this point. I enjoy representing my team, my country, my family, myself. I don't think at my age I need to represent something more than that."

In her family, learning counts higher than anything else. Mary Gen's father, Bud, was a doctor who was highly decorated (two Bronze Stars, Silver Star, Purple Heart) for his World War II service as a naval combat surgeon. Dave's father, Jaromir, came to the United States from Czechoslovakia at age 19 to study and was advised by his father to stay when the Soviet occupiers cracked down on his homeland. Jaromir wound up with a bachelor's degree from Rutgers and an MBA and a doctorate in economics from New York University. He was in the process of teaching himself Swedish, his eighth language, at the time of his death.

Dave Ledecky went to Harvard, then Yale Law School. His brother, Jon, co-owner of the New York Islanders, got his undergrad and MBA degrees from Harvard, at which he has endowed fellowships in the names of his mother and father.

"The way our parents believe in education, it was a no-brainer Katie wasn't going to turn professional," Dave Ledecky said.

BEFORE THE 2012 Olympics, Suguiyama had asked Ledecky what her goal was.

"To make the Olympic team," she said with no hesitation.

"OK," he answered, "but let's keep that to ourselves."

He had tinkered with Ledecky's mechanics in the spring and summer of 2011, getting her to breathe just on the right side instead of bilaterally, finding a way for her to use her legs more than most female distance swimmers did at the time. "I wanted to take advantage of her strength and the controlled fury with which she swims sometimes," Suguiyama said.

The result was a stroke with a "hitch" or "gallop," where the left arm glides slightly longer atop the water than the right, a motion that Phelps and others say looks like a man's stroke. It worked because Ledecky had a sense of timing so refined she knew how much longer to keep her left arm gliding and when to move her hips to get the full stroke and to avoid drag after finishing the breathing phase.

"She is very connected, meaning her upper body and lower body work in unison," said Bob Bowman, Phelps' coach for 20 years. "Therefore, she is very efficient."

The result would be something Gemmell now describes in terms he believes originated with Olympic champion Matt Biondi. "She grabs water and pulls like a rock climber," Gemmell said. "Everyone else's hand moves through the water. She moves her body past her hand."

At 14, as she began to mature physically, Ledecky started shredding her personal bests in the 800 meters. Her times went from 9:02.70 to 8:36.05 over a four-meet span from a dual meet in May 2011 to the junior national championships she dominated in August.

By the next year, her 800 time would drop to 8:14.63 in the Olympic final. She swam that fast a few days after John Leonard of the U.S., executive director of the World Swimming Coaches Association, voiced his suspicions about China's Ye Shiwen, then 16, who won the 400 IM in a world-record time and swam the final 50 meters faster than men's winner Ryan Lochte of the United States. "Unbelievable" and "disturbing," said Leonard, comments that opened the door for journalists to question Ledecky about performance-enhancing drugs since, like Shiwen, she was a relative unknown coming into London. Within minutes of her victory, Ledecky was asked whether she doped.

"Was I shocked by the question? Sort of," she said. "It was almost like a laughable matter because I just wouldn't do it.

"I could understand it, and I appreciate the concern people have for it. I think it was almost an honor -- that's kind of the approach we decided to take -- it's like an honor that people are questioning it because that means they think you did something special or out of the world."

German TV network ZDF brought up the issue again at last year's worlds, where Ledecky dominated the competition while swimming 6,200 meters in 10 races, including a 200 semifinal barely a half-hour after she set a world record in the 1,500.

"Is that humanly possible?" the network's reporter asked German head coach Henning Lambertz.

"It obviously is, but it is definitely astonishing how she absorbs all this," Lambertz replied.

"Does that raise question marks?" the reporter continued.

"Not with me," Lambertz answered.

U.S. Anti-Doping Agency statistics show Ledecky has undergone 52 doping controls beginning in 2012, with 15 so far this year. Those numbers include all in- and out-of-competition testing on U.S. athletes conducted under USADA's testing program, as well as USADA-requested tests conducted by other testing agencies on U.S. athletes training internationally.

All of Ledecky's tests through USADA and at international competitions outside the United States have come back negative. She understands that even that does not answer all doubts, given past examples of athletes such as Marion Jones and Lance Armstrong beating the tests through clever subterfuge.

"It's annoying and frustrating when you see athletes that do dope and sometimes they're not punished harshly enough," she said. "It has never crossed my mind to dope. It's not who I am."

SWIMMING CAN BE a hard sport to watch. Much of the action is water splashing, with the churn of arms and legs in shorter races roiling the pool like gale-force winds. Even sitting at no angle from the finish line, even with a live broadcast on a large video screen, a spectator frequently cannot determine the results.

Athletes often are in a similar position of uncertainty until they lift their goggles and squint through humid, chlorinated air in a search for their time and place on an electronic scoreboard at the other end of the pool. After 50 or 100 or 1,500 meters, when swimmers' capped-and-goggled heads have made their faces nearly invisible to spectators, the end of the race is the first time in 20-odd seconds or nearly 15 minutes when there is a chance to see any emotion or strain on their faces.

Triumph usually brings a smile, a scream, a punch of the water, a thumbs-up -- maybe all those reactions -- then a hug for a competitor in an adjacent lane. Other expressions are rare, even more so if the swimmer is Katie Ledecky. She gets plenty of chances to celebrate, having won every significant freestyle race in an Olympic-length pool, beginning with the 2012 London Olympics, where tears rolled down her face during the medal ceremony. But she usually does not have a demonstrative personality in public.

Yet there have been at least two other moments when Ledecky let the whole world see what she was feeling.

The first came at the 2014 Pan Pacific Championships in Australia. In abominable weather conditions during the four-day outdoor meet, she won the 200, 400 (breaking her own world record), 800 and 1,500 freestyles, swum the 100 free heats and a leg of the winning 4x200 relay. After setting another world record in that 1,500 on the meet's final day, Katie's face contorted in a grimace -- cheeks puffing, eyes squinched - for nearly a minute. "The good news," a TV commentator said, "is she actually looks as if she was in pain."

Gemmell saw something else. "All those races, the weather, and she didn't bat an eye," he said. "That's when I was kind of like, `This girl's pretty good.'"

The second moment was at the 2015 World Championships, in Kazan, Russia, where she had the no-time-to-rest double of the 1,500 final and 200 semifinal. Gemmell and Ledecky discussed the risk of that challenge -- she could be too tired from the 1,500 to make the 200 final. "She looked at me incredulously and said, `That's not going to happen,''' he recalled.

Gemmell counseled her to swim the longer race conservatively. She already had broken her 1,500 world record in the prelims, and had an enormous edge over the competition. At the end of the final, Ledecky had a quizzical look on her face -- part grin, part guilt -- as she made eye contact with the coach. She had won by 14.66 seconds, and broken her day-old world mark by 2.23. "I think she just kind of amazes herself every once in a while," Evans said. In the 200 semifinal 32 minutes later, she rallied from behind to qualify sixth overall and won the final a day later.

That fearless approach is what distinguishes Ledecky from many other distance swimmers.

"Bruce says, `Every race is a sprint; some people sprint longer than others," she explained. At the Olympic trials, Ledecky led every lap of her seven races except for the first two in the 200 final. In the 400 and 800 finals, the outcome essentially was decided after 50 meters, but Ledecky held the fans' interest by staying ahead of the red line on the video screen that shows world record pace for most of each race. Red-lining is just the way she swims.

"I take it out fast to challenge myself to bring it home faster," she said.

In January, Ledecky swam faster in both halves of a world-record 800 - out in 4:03.22, back in 4:03.46 - than Evans had while setting a world record for the 400 (4:03.85) that stood from 1988 until 2009. "There was a point people thought no woman would ever break it," Bowman said. And then Katie goes 4:03-4:03. When people ask me what is the most amazing swim I've ever seen, before that I probably would have said Michael's 400 IM at Beijing [2008 Olympics], but now what Katie did might be it."

There is a perfect, repetitive symmetry about 4:03-4:03. It is who Katie Ledecky is. Amazing. Over and over again.