COLORADO SPRINGS The guide enthusiastically led his guest from room to room in the barracks-style building, pointing out features like the emotion tree and providing thumbnail sketches of the people they encountered. He seemed to know everyone, and everyone returned his greetings in kind with a comment that elicited the guides generous, rumbling laugh.
The tour ended in a television room, where the guest and the guide watched an Arizona Cardinals football game while grazing on snacks. For years, the guide, Michael Phelps, and his guest, Bob Bowman, had watched N.F.L. games together, but from a suite above the Baltimore Ravens home field at M&T Bank Stadium, sealed off from autograph- and selfie-seeking strangers but often surrounded by friends who fed off Phelpss swimming fame.
The trip to see Phelps by Bowman, his longtime coach, at the Meadows, a treatment center in Wickenburg, Ariz., northwest of Phoenix, in the fall of 2014 was a revelation, an introduction to a man stripped of the armor that had helped make him an athletic machine.
Bowman had difficulty reconciling the swimmer who wore headphones to the starting blocks to sequester himself from the outside world, the guy who was so deeply absorbed in his own journey that he did not learn the given names of all of his teammates on the 2004 and 2008 United States Olympic swimming squads, with the person standing before him offering biographical snippets on those who walked past.
He was like, That guy over there, he owns his own company, Bowman said. He had a little story about everybody. I had never seen him like that. I looked at him like Who are you?
It is among the questions Phelps, 30, sought answers to in rehab and, in some ways, is still answering as he prepares for his fifth consecutive Olympics.
Phelpss road to becoming the most decorated athlete in Olympic history had been treacherously steep and single-file narrow, as isolating as a deep free divers plunge. The years he should have spent developing and embracing his personality were devoted to developing and embracing his swimming talents.
It seemed like a path well chosen when Phelps won a record eight gold medals at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. The years that followed produced more Olympic glory but also a damning photograph of Phelps with a bong, a second D.U.I. arrest and numerous splintered relationships.
By the end of 2014, it appeared plain to everyone that the trail Phelps blazed had veered into a dead end.
He had no idea what to do with the rest of his life, Bowman said. It made me feel terrible. I remember one day I said: Michael, you have all the money that anybody your age could ever want or need; you have a profound influence in the world; you have free time and youre the most miserable person I know. Whats up with that?
Phelps has spent the past year and a half pondering it first in therapy as an inpatient at the Meadows and later in the pool, which started out as his sanctuary, became his glassed-in aquarium and now serves as his platform. His message: Vulnerability is a strength.
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Phelpss nadir came two years ago, on the last Monday of September. On his way out of the Horseshoe Casino, two miles from Baltimores Inner Harbor, after an evening spent playing poker while drinking, Phelps placed a phone call to his girlfriend, Nicole Johnson. After a two-year estrangement, they had recently gotten back together, a reconciliation set into motion by a soul-baring call from Phelps.
It was after 1 a.m. on the East Coast. Johnson, on the West Coast, asked Phelps if he was sure he was O.K. to drive home. He had spent the start of the weekend with her in California at a wedding and had flown home on a redeye, landing in Baltimore less than 24 hours earlier.
She said she was concerned that fatigue from his hectic weekend, combined with the cross-country travel, might aggravate the effects of the alcohol in his system.
A few minutes later, she received a text from Phelps, who was stopped at a light. Theres a cop behind me, he said. An hour passed before her next communication from Phelps, who phoned from jail.
His Range Rover had been clocked by the police traveling 84 miles per hour in a 45 m.p.h. zone, and Phelps had been observed crossing the double lines. According to a report in The Baltimore Sun, he failed two field sobriety tests, and a breath analysis recorded his blood-alcohol level at 0.14, 0.06 in excess of the state driving limit.
For the next 72 hours, Phelps locked himself in his house and refused to see or talk to anyone. At one point, he texted his agent, Peter Carlisle, and said he wrote, I dont want to be alive anymore.
The machine was irrevocably broken.
I didnt see me as me, Phelps said. I saw me as everybody else did as an all-American kid. Lets be honest. Theres not a single human being in the world thats like that.
