[pedrosorio]

"Not more than three to four." != "Three or four hours practicing every day consistently"

Also, this guy has been performing at an extremely high level for years. If he didn't do any competitive programming practice at all for a year, I doubt you'd notice a big difference in his performance.

Some of the top guys at Topcoder Open / Google Code Jam don't even participate in matches outside of the yearly tournament and I doubt they are practicing consistently (i.e. once you get to that level at problem solving, performance doesn't seem to decay much and certainly much less than in a similar situation for athletes - though these guys are students / engineers whose brains are still being stimulated and solving other kinds of problems outside of competitions).