American Aquaman

Doing some photo hunting for a colleague and I landed on this killer piece from Michael Sokolove in the New York Times Magazine a few years back. What a great piece of work on olympic swimmer Michael Phelps. Give it a read: Phelps is no good on land. He is weirdly hyperflexible, what is sometimes called double-jointed, and therefore not entirely stable. He does not lift weights. He used to run but gave it up because of a tendency to step in holes or trip over nothing. To exert himself on land, even mildly, is to risk orthopedic peril. A couple of years ago he went bowling with his buddies and caught hell for it. What was he thinking? Were a couple of frames really worth it?

By early afternoon…