Ryan Lochte Gets Emotional as He Opens Up About Recovering from 'Near-Death' Car Crash (Exclusive)

"If you try to just better yourself every day and just keep moving forward and not dwell on the past ... no one's going to stop you,” he tells PEOPLE

Ryan Lochte’s body has been through a lot over the course of his Olympic swimming career — torn knees, fractured feet, you name it — but nothing compares to recovering from a crash last fall that he calls a “near-death experience.”

“It kind of puts your whole life in perspective,” he tells PEOPLE in a nearly hourlong, at times emotional interview about the wreck and its aftermath.

Lochte, 40, was driving to pick up his kids from school in Gainesville, Fla., on Nov. 21 when the vehicle in front of him unexpectedly pulled out of their lane to avoid a stopped trash truck.

The gold medal swimmer, driving alone in his truck, wasn’t so lucky.

“The car in front of me swerved and got out [of the way] and then I immediately tried to swerve, and I … ran into the damn thing,” Lochte said on 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 in trauma and they did surgery” — and then months after that at home recuperating with very limited mobility.

“I scared a lot of people,” he says now. “I scared myself.”

But almost no one publicly knew about his injuries or his recovery, until Millis released the podcast appearance after Lochte had healed. The swimmer tells PEOPLE that was all by design.

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“I could have died,” he says, “and I was uncomfortable about sharing it just because it was so traumatic to me and to the family.”

Now, though, “I am on this road to recovery, I am feeling better, I am getting up, I am moving around,” Lochte says. “I [thought that I] could share this and maybe it could help other people.”

In particular, he believes it may help to share the lessons he’s learned about how he doubted his body, struggled with impatience as the days and weeks went by, grappled with that uncertainty and then chose to keep going.

Related: Ryan Lochte Talks About Going from 'Hero to Zero,' and How He's 'Bettering' Himself Every Day

“You are going to get knocked down, but it's not how you got knocked down — it's how you get up,” he says.

"If you try to just better yourself every day and just keep moving forward and not dwell on the past and just learn from it, no one's going to stop you," he continues. "You're going to be unstoppable."

That doesn’t mean it was easy. Not at all.

“One of the hardest things was when I was recovering at the house, I was basically a vegetable,” Lochte says. “I couldn't do anything. I couldn't get up, really. I couldn't get up to move to the bathroom, because if I had to go, it takes me 30 minutes to get from my bed to the bathroom.”

It was worse not being able to physically be as present for his three young children with wife Kayla: son Caiden, 7, daughter Liv, 5, and 1-year-old daughter Georgia.

“The hardest thing was me not being able to hold my kids,” he says, “because I'm the play dad. I'm like a big kid myself.”

He intentionally kept them away from seeing him while in the hospital, to limit their exposure to what he thought could be a traumatizing moment.

"What they know is Daddy got in a big car accident, he broke his leg, but he's okay. That's all they need to know,” Lochte says.

Related: Ryan Lochte Explains Why U.S. Swimmers Can’t Leave the Olympic Village During the Games

Difficult, too, was adjusting his perspective to his new and more serious injuries, unlike anything as an athlete.

“I broke my [right] femur completely and then the bolts that they put in to hold up my metal plate [in my leg] broke in half, which then caused my knee to tear, so I tore my meniscus,” he says. “So then I had to fix all that while I'm recovering through my broken femur. And I'm trying to take one step forward — and I'm getting eight steps back.”

“No matter how hard I tried, how hard I fought it, I could not move forward,” he recalls. “I needed the rest.”

Rest and time. It was another painful lesson to learn.

“We're supposed to be these machines, and I wasn’t,” Lochte says. “And that's when I started getting depressed and started being like, I don't know what to do.”

He recalls now how “I went back to the doctor being like, ‘Hey, is something wrong? Did you do something wrong to me? Why can't I get up and start running now?’ They're like, ‘You understand that you just broke the biggest bone in your body? It could take years. You have to be patient.’ And I'm like, ‘That's one thing I don't have.’ ”

Kayla, who works in real estate, “was very supportive,” Lochte says. But he admits: “It was harder for her, because she's by herself. I can't get up, I can't help.”

“[The] kids, I can't go pick them up, I can't do this. So it was very hard for her, and she just knew she had to or else this family would fall apart,” Lochte says.

His lengthy recovery frayed their relationship temporarily, he says. But they “stick together through thick and thin” and “we're back to where we needed to be.”

About four months after the wreck, Lochte says, he was able to move around with crutches and could focus more on his physical recovery.

“I had a physical therapist that has been with me throughout my swimming career, through all my injuries, so he knows my body the best. So he came over and he has these machines that do a lot of electromagnetic pulses to heal up the process faster,” Lochte says. “I was doing a lot of that and a lot of little minor exercises in the bed — flexing my quad muscles and then relaxing it, doing a lot of that stuff.”

But mentally, his “light at the end of the tunnel” moment came more recently while he working with a therapist and traveling out of Florida for an as-yet-undisclosed project.

The therapist, Lochte says, “just put everything in perspective into swimming terms.”

“You got to think every time you wake up, you're in the pool and what do you do when you swim? You attack it,” Lochte says, describing the advice. “You just keep moving forward and things like that. So I started thinking like that and I'm like, ‘Man, this is kind of making sense.’ “

When he returned home, “I was just a go-getter and it helped. I was just almost like Ryan's back, but a better version. I started eating healthier, started working out.”

Related: Ryan Lochte and His Wife, Kayla, Celebrate Their 5th Wedding Anniversary

In late August, he and Kayla, 33, shared some raw behind-the-scenes moments from his recovery on social media. “This guy has been putting in the work one step at a time, literally!” she wrote in a caption on Instagram.

The video ends with Lochte jogging in his neighborhood — limping, but not much — in a moment that he says was filmed around a month ago.

He's been working with a personal trainer, Max Sandquist, who put him on a schedule (both physical and mental) like Mark Wahlberg's. Day by day, he is able to run longer and longer distances, even if it’s just a few extra feet at a time.

He does find that he is worn out more easily. While celebrating his 40th birthday with friends and family last month, “I was always on my feet so it kind of took a toll and I could feel it,” Lochte says. “It felt like I was just running all day every day. But it's a lot better than I was three months ago.”

“It’s still not 100%. I can't physically run normal, and I physically can't jump up and land and be completely fine,” he says. “I can do squats. Lunges still hurt. So there's still things I'm working my way up. Until then, I'm just getting my leg better.”

Looking back at 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 got to make the best of it.”

The six-time gold medalist has plenty on the horizon: clinics through his swim academy and Life Time fitness, another part of his recovery; and he's working on a branded sunscreen (named, of course, Blochte); while Kayla is “killing it in real estate.”

There’s time for other outings, too: Lochte recently competed on Netflix in a chicken wing eating contest with other Olympians against Matt Stonie, a professional eater. (Lochte got down 16 or 17, he says — “it was all fun.”)

He’s come far in less than a year.

“I'm just embracing everything,” he says, adding, “As long as I'm doing everything with a smile on my face and my family's okay, I'm okay.”

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