There are plenty of people I've met who are like this. They can be just as impressive in their relative performance as a star athlete is from an average one. As someone who does frequent exercises, I'd say the same things from sports apply to intellectual work: eat well, sleep well, make your training as hard if not harder than the actual game. This means training your intellectual muscles: read as much as you can about the field, pick up college textbooks (SICP, Theory of Comp, etc.), classic works (C book, Pragmatic Programmer, etc). Turn the scary sounding things (compilers, OS, networking) into exciting, comprehendible subjects. Your workplace performance will increase as a result.

Unfortunately I don't know of communities like this other than the workplace environment, and HN :)