Published July 4, 2026 04:58AM
“I can’t believe I did it,” Rob Lea exhales. “I am totally and utterly wrecked.”
He slumps to the shore of Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, salt-crusted and green with zinc paste.
This scene played out on June 30, when Lea, 44, swam across the Tsugaru Strait in the Sea of Japan, which connects the island of Honshu to Hokkaido, over the course of 12 hours.
The open-water swim was the final leg of a challenge that Lea, a realtor and endurance athlete, has spent the last 17 years working toward.
Lea is believed to be the first person to finish both the Seven Summits and the Oceans Seven, known as the Double Seven. Lea believes he is the first person to ever complete a challenge called the “Double Seven,” which comprises both mountaineering and open-water swimming challenges. He climbed the Seven Summits, the highest peaks on all of the continents. He also completed the Oceans Seven, an open-water challenge that requires swimmers to complete unassisted solo crossings of seven iconic ocean channels.
Only some 44 people have ever finished the Oceans Seven; a few hundred have done the Seven Summits—and until now, nobody has done both, according to Lea.
Forty hours after swimming the Tsugaru Strait, Lea was exhausted. “All I want to do is lie in my bed and rest,” he tells Outside. “I really gave that swim everything”
His shoulders ached, his neck and armpits were chafed raw, and his mouth, after nearly 12 hours of saltwater exposure, was raw and swollen. “The saltwater just kind of eats away at the inside of my mouth,” he says to me over a video call from Japan. “It’s like canker sores all over my mouth.”
A Journey Spanning Nearly Two Decades
The feat caps a 17-year journey for Lea, a Park City, Utah, resident and former Ironman 70.3 age-group world champion. In 2009, he climbed Argentina’s Aconcagua, a summit of nearly 23,000 feet, years before the Oceans Seven and Seven Summits were even on his radar. He came up with the idea for the “Double Seven” in 2017, after an ankle injury sent him into surgery and a doctor told him to stop running. He needed a goal to motivate his rehab, so he set his sights on swimming across the English Channel.
Lea’s final swim was the Tsugaru Strait, which separates Japan’s main island of Honshu from Hokkaido. He had attempted the swim once before in 2023. Regulatory groups who monitor the crossing halted his effort after determining he wouldn’t beat their 14-hour cutoff, a safety measure that prohibits night swims. Swimming during the day, though, brings stronger winds and currents. This time, he entered the water at 4:09 A.M. and finished in 11 hours and 44 minutes.
“It was a tale of two different swims,” he says. “The first half of the swim was going almost too well. I felt great. The time was passing. Then as I hit hour five of the swim, the current picked up and I was basically trying to punch through the current.”
The current reached around 4.7 knots at times, dragging him parallel to the coast, away from his goal. He kept swimming, hoping the current would release him. His first emotion after finishing “was just relief.”
Lea hasn’t done it alone. His wife, professional ski mountaineer Caroline Gleich, climbed five of the seven summits with him and crewed most of his channel swims from a support boat. She mixed his liquid feeds and threw the bottles to him on a retractable dog leash. When Gleich noticed his arm wasn’t clearing the water the way it usually does on the Tsugaru crossing, she didn’t ask about his shoulder. She pulverized an Excedrin and mixed it into his next feed bottle.
“Going across one of the world’s gnarliest open water crossings in these little boats is not for the faint of heart,” Gleich tells Outside. “I’m also very tired. It’s a different kind of fatigue, but also deeply gratifying.”
“The best way to think about a crew on a swim is being on a rope team with someone,” Lea says. “If one person goes down, the whole team’s going down.”
From Climbing Mountains to Swimming Oceans
Most people train for one extreme environment, but Lea trained his body to adapt to both mountain and open-water environments. In 2019, Lea climbed Mount Everest and then swam the 21-mile English Channel 46 days later. The turnaround time required him to gain 30 pounds on a diet of pizza and heavy cream. In frigid water, wearing only a Speedo, body fat is insulation. He knew he could swim the distance; the real crux was hypothermia. “I spent years in cold baths and cold lakes, doing whatever I could to acclimatize my body for that swim,” he says.
There were other hazards too. Jellyfish stung him more than 100 times during his Channel crossing. He almost came to appreciate the nuisance. “I kind of looked forward to these compass jellyfish stings to keep me awake on an almost 12-hour swim,” he wrote on Instagram, where he can be seen swimming face-first into one.
Rob Lea’s Seven Summits list includes Mont Blanc for Europe rather than Russia’s Mount Elbrus, which appears on both the Bass and Messner lists. The continental boundary is contested. By one traditional definition, the Europe–Asia line runs along the Kuma–Manych Depression, north of the Caucasus, which would place Elbrus in Asia and make Mont Blanc the continent’s highest peak.
Also, “the reality of it was that Elbrus was unsafe to go to,” he says. “I didn’t think it was appropriate for me to encourage people to go to Russia at this time.”
Trouble in the Ka’iwi Channel
Seven months before his final swim, Lea spent over 14 hours crossing the 27-mile Ka’iwi Channel. Cookiecutter sharks in the channel’s deepest waters have taken to biting swimmers, so organizers required him to swim the deepest section in daylight, trading shark risk for high winds, chop, and current.
When the swim got hard, Lea leaned on a mantra: “54, 54, 54.” That was the number of hours marathon swimmer Sarah Thomas spent completing her four-way nonstop swim across the English Channel in 2019. “I can swim for another hour, two, three, five if I have to,” he told himself.
Six hours after finishing, he was in a hospital with swimming-induced pulmonary edema, a dangerous buildup of fluid in the lungs. “As I was swimming, I was in essence drowning in my own fluids,” he says. A full recovery took three months.
“I Feel More Alive”
For Lea, the motivation is the range of emotions and experience. “You go from the lowest low to the highest high, and sometimes that can happen in a snap of the fingers,” he says. “I feel more alive when I do these things.” One adventure immerses him in the deep history of the English Channel, another in the solitude of a month in Antarctica on Vinson Massif, another in the hustle of the Strait of Gibraltar, one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.
He hopes the project pushes people toward their own scary goals. “We all have that dream that feels scary, the mountain you see from your back window,” Gleich says. “I hope this inspires people to put that date on the calendar and turn their dreams into plans.”
For now, Lea says he is looking forward to rest and to deciding what will make him uncomfortable next.
