Ryan Lochte’s body has been through a lot during his Olympic swimming career — torn knees, broken feet, you name it — but nothing compares to recovering from an accident last fall that he calls a “near-death experience.”
“It kind of puts your whole life into perspective,” he tells PEOPLE in a nearly hour-long, at times emotional interview about the accident and its aftermath.
Lochte, 40, was driving to pick up his children from school in Gainesville, Fla., on Nov. 21 when the vehicle in front of him unexpectedly swerved out of their lane to avoid a stopped garbage truck.
The golden swimmer, who was driving alone in his truck, was not so lucky.
“The car in front of me turned and got out [of the way] and then I immediately tried to turn and … I ran into the damn thing,” Lochte said on the Kyle Millis podcast, in a clip released in July.
The impact of the wreck crumpled the front of Lochte’s truck like a tin can, photos show. He spent three days in the hospital, he says — “I was rushed right away for trauma and had surgery” — and then months after that at home recuperating with very limited mobility.
“I scared a lot of people,” he says now. “I was scared.”
But almost no one knew publicly about his injuries or his recovery, until Millis released a podcast appearance after Lochte’s recovery. The swimmer tells PEOPLE that it was all planned.
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Ryan Lochte with his wife Kayla (back) and their daughter Liv (left) and son Caiden.
Simon Bruty/Sports Illustrated/Getty
“I could have died,” he says, “and I was embarrassed to share that just because it was so traumatic for me and for the family.”
Now, however, “I’m on the road to recovery, I’m feeling better, I’m getting up, I’m moving,” Lochte says. “I [thought that I] could share this and maybe it could help other people.”
Specifically, he believes it might help him share the lessons he learned about how he doubted his body, struggled with impatience as the days and weeks passed, struggled with that uncertainty, and then decided to move on.
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“You’re going to get knocked down, but it doesn’t matter how you fall – it’s how you get up,” he says.
“If you try to just get better every day and just keep moving forward and don’t dwell on the past and just learn from it, nobody’s going to stop you,” he continues. “You will be unstoppable.”
That doesn’t mean it was easy. Not at all.
“One of the hardest things was when I was recovering at home, I was basically a vegetable,” Lochte says. “I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t get up, really. I couldn’t get up to go to the bathroom because if I had to go, it would take me 30 minutes to get from bed to the bathroom.”
It was worse that he couldn’t be physically present for his three young children with wife Kayla: son Caiden, 7, daughter Liv, 5, and one-year-old daughter Georgia.
“The hardest thing for me was not being able to hold my children,” he says, “because I’m a game dad. I’m like a big kid myself.”
He purposely kept them away from him while they were in the hospital, to limit their exposure to what he thought could be a traumatizing moment.
“What they know is that dad was in a big car accident, he broke his leg, but he’s fine. That’s all they need to know,” Lochte says.
Ryan Lochte explains why US swimmers can’t leave the Olympic Village during the Games
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Ryan Lochte (back) with his family.
Kayla Rae Reid/Instagram
It was also difficult to adjust my perspective to new and more serious injuries, unlike any other athlete.
“I broke mine [right] femur completely and then the screws they put in to hold my metal plate [in my leg] broke in half, which then caused my knee to break, so I tore the meniscus,” he says. “Then I had to fix it all while recovering from a broken femur. I try to take one step forward — and take eight steps back.”
“No matter how hard I tried, how much I fought against it, I couldn’t move forward,” he recalls. “I needed the rest.”
Rest and time. It was another painful lesson to learn.
“We were supposed to be those machines, and I wasn’t,” Lochte says. “And then I started to get depressed and I started to think, I don’t know what to do.”
Now, he recalls, “I went back to the doctor and said, ‘Hey, is there something wrong? Did you hide something from me? Why can’t I get up and start running now?’ They say, ‘Do you understand that you just broke the biggest bone in your body?’ It could take years. You have to be patient.’ And I say, ‘That’s one thing I don’t have.’ ”
Kayla, who works in real estate, “has been very supportive,” says Lochte. But she admits: “It was more difficult for her because she is alone. I can’t get up, I can’t help.”
“[The] children, I can’t go get them, I can’t do it. So it was very difficult for her and she just knew she had to because otherwise this family was going to fall apart,” says Lochte.
His long recovery temporarily disrupted their relationship, he says. But they “stick together through thick and thin” and “we’re back where we should be.”
About four months after the accident, Lochte says, he was able to move around with the help of crutches and was able to focus more on his physical recovery.
“I had a physiotherapist who was with me throughout my swimming career, through all my injuries, so he knows my body best. So he comes in and has these machines that give a lot of electromagnetic pulses to make the healing process faster,” Lochte says. “I was doing a lot of that and a lot of little smaller exercises in bed — flexing my quads and then relaxing them, doing a lot of that.”
But mentally, his “light at the end of the tunnel” moment came recently while working with a therapist and traveling outside of Florida for an as-yet-unreleased project.
The therapist, Lochte says, “just puts everything into perspective in terms of swimming.”
“Every time you wake up you have to think you’re in the pool and what are you doing while you’re swimming? You attack it,” says Lochte, describing the advice. “Just keep moving forward and stuff like that. So I started thinking like that and I said, ‘Man, this kind of makes sense.’ ”
When he returned home, “I was just kind and that helped. I was almost like Ryan’s back, but a better version. I started eating healthier, I started exercising.”
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In late August, he and Kayla, 33, shared some raw behind-the-scenes moments of his recovery on social media. “This guy puts in the work one step at a time, literally!” she wrote in the description on Instagram.
The video ends with Lochte jogging in his neighborhood — limping, but not by much — in a moment he says was filmed about a month ago.
He worked with a personal trainer, Max Sandquist, who put him on a schedule (both physically and mentally) like Mark Wahlberg. Day by day, he is able to run longer and longer distances, even if it’s just a few feet more.
However, he finds that it wears out more easily. As he celebrated his 40th birthday with friends and family last month, “I was on my feet all the time so it took a toll and I could feel it,” Lochte says. “I felt like I was just running all day every day. But it’s much better than three months ago.”
“It’s still not 100%. I can’t physically run normally, I can’t physically jump and land and be completely fine,” he says. “I can do squats. The strides still hurt. So there are still things I’m working on. Until then, I’m just recovering my leg.”
Looking back on what he survived, Lochte chokes up as he talks about his family and thanks God, he says, “for giving me another day.”
“And now I have to make the most of it.”
The six-time gold medalist has a lot on the horizon: clinics through his swim academy and Life Time fitness, another part of his recovery; and works on a branded sunscreen (called, of course, Blochte); while Kayla is “killing herself in real estate.”
He has time for other outings, too: Lochte recently competed on Netflix in a chicken-wing-eating contest with fellow Olympians against Matt Stonie, a professional eater. (Lochte dropped 16 or 17, he says — “it was all fun.”)
He has come a long way in less than a year.
“I just accept everything,” he says and adds, “As long as I do everything with a smile on my face and my family is fine, I’m fine.”
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