The First Person to Complete the Double Seven with Rob Lea

0:01Rob Lea:Rob Lea, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. Seven summits, seven oceans, 100 plus jellyfish stings, 139 ,000 feet of climbing, 124 miles of open ocean swimming. Dang. Congrats. Well, thanks for having me on the show. And gosh, I'm glad to have a little rest here and to take some time, reflect on the whole thing and chat with you. In June of 2026, Rob Lee became the first person to complete the Double Seven, a project that involves climbing the seven summits and swimming seven iconic ocean crossings. For most people, either one of these feats would be the undertaking of a lifetime. But Rob has always been a multi-sport athlete who thinks outside the box.

0:48Rob Lea:As a skilled mountaineer, swimmer, and Ironman champion, Rob wanted to create a new kind of challenge to push himself further than he'd ever gone before. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard.

1:13Rob Lea:Before we dive into Rob's story, there are a few things you should know. First, Rob is married to Caroline Gleick, a professional skier, mountaineer, and an all-around badass who ran for U.S. Senate in 2024. Caroline's actually been on the podcast before, twice. She's a huge inspiration, and I've always been an athlete, but I think this most recent project and these bigger projects, I really owe a lot to her. She dreams big, and she taught me to dream big and go for it. Second, while you may be familiar with the Seven Summits, the highest peaks on each continent, you might not have heard of the Ocean Seven.

1:52Rob Lea:These seven famous ocean crossings include the English Channel and the Strait of Gibraltar. It might seem random to pair open water swimming with mountaineering, but for Rob, it made perfect sense. He'd have been competing in triathlon for several years until 2017, when an injury forced him to change course.

2:13I had an ankle injury that I went into the doctor and I kind of knew probably what he was going to say, but I was sitting there and he was kind of reviewing everything and looking at my ankle. And he said, yeah, we should do surgery on the ankle. And also like medically speaking, you should really never be a runner. You shouldn't run again. So literally sitting on the doctor's table there in 2017, I thought I need something to look forward to something to train for. I'd been a swimmer my whole life. So I decided I was going to swim the English channel. So I got home and I started researching the English Channel.

2:44I realized there's quite a debate online what's harder, the English Channel or climbing Everest. And people who think of the English Channel as harder, it really strips you down because there's a lot of rules in open water swimming. You can't wear a wetsuit. You can't touch the boat. There's just rules around pretty much everything and how they observe it and how you ratify a swim. And Everest is a different kind of hard, right? It's like low-grade suffering, we call it. You're up on the mountain for a month or more at a time, and you're just feeling like crap, and basically your body's kind of slowly dying.

3:17So I decided, I thought, well, I wonder if anyone's done both of those to actually compare. And it turned out, at the time, there was nine people that had done it. They call it the peak and pond challenge. So I decided I was going to try to do these two together within a year period.

3:35Rob Lea:Rob was already an accomplished mountaineer at this point. He had summited Aconcagua in 2009, Denali in 2010, as well as various other big mountains. Still, it took two years for Rob to actually attempt the Pekin Pond Challenge. There was a huge amount of planning and training to do. In May of 2019, Rob and Caroline headed to China to climb Mount Everest together.

4:02Rob Lea:what was the highlight for you about Everest like what was a big moment for you or a scary moment or a really funny moment just I'd love to hear what's the story that you you share a lot with friends when I think of like the moments that I go back to that you can't make this stuff up kind of thing it would be like at camp two so we're on we would have been at 25 let me think about this real quick. We would have been at 25 ,000 feet at Camp 2. And in 2019, there was a lot of wind on Everest and it kind of got everybody backed up. We knew there was going to be lines heading to the summit. And so we decided at Camp 2 to spend an extra day there at 25 ,000 feet, which normally you wouldn't want to spend more time at that kind of elevation.

4:49But we decided we wanted to mitigate the risk of all the crowds. And I just remember sitting in the tent with Caroline, just absolutely delusional, like singing songs and just the silliness of being at 25 ,000 feet and kind of not being all the way with it. I mean, you're kind of like half drunk at that altitude and just having the best time of my life, kind of peeking out the tent every now and again, checking out what's going on and then going back to just being silly in the tent and those kinds of moments. You just live for them when you're in the mountains.

5:27Rob Lea:The month after he and Caroline summited Everest, Rob swam across the English Channel. A few weeks later, the couple got married in the mountains near their home in Utah. Gosh, I love an adventure love story. 2019 was a big year for Rob, but as we all know, the pandemic was just around the corner. When it hit, he had a lot of time to sit at home and think about what his next adventure might be. Rob decided to swim the Catalina Channel in California, completing the crossing in 2021. That same year, he and Caroline went to Antarctica to climb Vincent Massif. At this point, Rob realized that he'd already climbed four of the seven summits, and he had also already swam two of the Ocean's seven.

6:16Rob Lea:It dawned on him that he could combine the two projects into a completely new wild idea, the double seven.

6:27Caroline finally looked at me after I think I'd done one or two more swims and said like, hey, we got to put all of these on the calendar. Otherwise, we're going to spend our entire lives doing your project here. And she basically said, if we're going to do this, we're going to do it. And a lot of these swims have really long wait lists. I was on a wait list for swimming in Gibraltar for five years. You have to do it with the Federation and they just had a huge backup from A, the COVID years and the migration, immigration issues they have between Africa and Europe. So Caroline joined me for all the rest of the summits.

7:02And then on the swims, she joined me for most of them. She had to stay back for two as she was running for US Senate, and she was just a little bit busy. Okay.

7:11Rob Lea:So did you guys have a big calendar? Did you have a big spreadsheet? What did it look like? I literally just had like a draft email that I had the, the swims that I'd done and the, uh, summits I'd done. And then the next one, and I started going through saying like, okay, like this one can be done between these three months of the year, or some of them can be done any time of the year. Uh, and then, you know, maybe, uh, an approximation of how much it was going to cost and when we might be able to do it. And I just started kind of taking each one off and, um, Just making a plan to get each one done.

7:49Rob Lea:There are an incredible amount of logistics that go into a wild idea like this. Just to climb one mountain or swim one ocean crossing takes years of preparation. These adventures are expensive. They require mountain guides and boats, equipment and visas. At a certain point, Rob started doing two or three of these climbing and swimming expeditions per year. As he neared the end of his list, he was able to dial in his process. A lot of it was unpacking and repacking gear, waiting for the right weather, and preparing his body.

8:25Rob Lea:Climbing and swimming require really different body types and muscles. I mean, not really different, but climbers are usually built a little bit different than open ocean swimmers. So I want to talk about that and how you were able to prepare your body for those really different, when you've got altitude, then you have cold water. There's a lot going on there. You lose a lot of weight when you're at altitude, partly because your body's just kind of slowly eating itself. And I kind of knew that was coming. And I knew that I could swim for a long way. I knew I had the engine to potentially do this, but the whole challenge was not getting hypothermia.

8:58So I spent really years doing ice baths, doing my workouts in really cold environments to train and put on, we're trying to put on brown fat. It's like baby fat and it's a kind of a good fat that insulates you. So yeah, they're two totally different sports. And again, I've been a multi-sport athlete my whole life. I like that it balances you out. But for open water swimming, there's a huge advantage to having a little bit more mass on you. I mean, I don't know that it necessarily helps my flotation, but it probably does a little bit. Most of it's just to keep me warm.

9:28Rob Lea:Was there a swim that was incredibly memorable or scary or a climb? Yeah, the first kind of most scary moment that comes to mind is the second to last swim was the Molokai swim. So I swam from Molokai to Oahu in Hawaii, and that is the longest of the ocean, seven swims. It's about 30 miles. And I had always thought that the North Channel was going to be the most difficult swim. That one's between Ireland and Scotland. And that was absolutely difficult. Don't get me wrong. On that one, you have really cold water. It was about 53 degrees. You have these lion's mane jellyfish that pack a really powerful sting.

10:09But back to Molokai, that swim is really open ocean. And so you have these huge swells come through and it really tested me. I felt pretty good through about seven hours. And then I started having my ups and downs like I normally do. on all these challenges, you're going to have some downs that you just have to fight through. And I usually just think, okay, just get to that next feed, get 30 minutes down, and hopefully you'll start feeling better mind and body. But it was about 12 hours in, I was really struggling. I was literally having a hard time talking to the crew and keeping my head above water.

10:51And then it got dark on me. So that's from took me 14 hours and 36 minutes, I believe. And the last hour of that was in pitch black, but I could see the shore and I could hear some people on the shore yelling and screaming and cheering me on. But I literally thought I was like drowning out there. My heart was beating so hard. It felt like it was like beating out of its chest. And I was, I also had what's called rhabdo where basically your muscles start failing and releasing toxins into your body. I had all these things happening and I couldn't even swim. I would to take a couple of strokes, I might get a couple in, I'd switch over and lay on my back and try to do a couple of backstrokes.

11:31And again, I was just having so much trouble. It turned out that I had what's called SIPE, which is swimming induced pulmonary edema. And that's when you have fluid in your lungs. And it wasn't necessarily from ingesting like water, but this was like fluid in my body seeping into my lungs. And I was basically slowly drowning as I was finishing that swim. in addition to having rhabdo and all these other issues. And I really limped onto the shore, but I collapsed there and I usually am pretty spent after these swims. And so I thought, okay, just give me a night or give me a day or two and I'll feel better.

12:06But that night I didn't sleep at all. The second night I slept a few hours, maybe two or three hours. And I woke up and I heard this gurgling in my chest and crackling. And I recognized that from what I'd been taught to watch out for in the high mountains. And Caroline, I think had been listening to me do that as I slept as well. And so we decided, I think it was about 36 hours after the swim to go to the hospital. And luckily they were able to give me some diuretics, a drug called Lasix to get the fluid out of my lungs.

12:36Rob Lea:How long did it take you to recover from that? So that particular swim, most of the swims I recover pretty quickly from, but that particular swim, took me a good two to three months for my lungs to fully heal. I didn't do any physical activity for, I would say, a couple of weeks. I mean, literally when we got to the airport to head home from Hawaii, I was in a wheelchair and I was in pretty rough shape and my lungs were pretty damaged. So it took a while to recover from that one.

13:10Rob Lea:It's hard to describe the difficulty of getting back out on an adventure when you've had to face a life-threatening condition. That fear can linger in the back of your mind for a long time. After the Molokai swim, Rob only had one more ocean crossing left on his list.

13:43Rob Lea:A few years ago, Rob Lee decided to combine two classic outdoor challenges, the Seven Summits and the Ocean Seven. Most of the mountains Rob climbed required multi-day expeditions, and the ocean crossings took up to 15 hours of non-stop swimming. While he was in the water, he had to battle strong currents, icy cold temperatures, and extremely painful jellyfish stings. Sometimes getting through the discomfort was less about his physical conditioning and more about his mindset.

14:17Rob Lea:Talk to me about your mental training. Like, what do you say to yourself when you just, you're like, I don't know if I can make it anymore, or you're getting stung by like the 98th jellyfish? Yeah, I think, you know, I've been an athlete my whole life, as I've said, and I think you learn to recognize the type of pain and issues that you can push through and some that you can't. But when I'm swimming and I'm having doubts that I'm going to get it done, whether that's just all in my head or my body's having issues, I'm getting cramps or those kind of things. on my Molokai swim. I particularly remember having this kind of chant in my head and that was 56, 56, 56.

15:03That comes from a friend of mine, open water swimmer, Sarah Thomas. I consider her the goat of open water swimming. She is a huge inspiration of mine. And she swam the year that I swam the English channel. And I was thinking, Hey, that's pretty cool. I swam in the English channel. She swam it four times in a row without stopping. She was the first person to ever do that. And I believe that swim was 54 hours. And that was her second longest swim ever. She also did a 56 hour swim, swimming the length of Lake Powell. And I just kept chanting that to myself thinking, okay, if Sarah can do this for 54 hours, I can swim for another hour, two, three.

15:40So she's been a huge inspiration and she's helped me get through some of those mental blocks and tough times when I'm out there in the ocean and just want to grab onto the boat and get in.

15:49Rob Lea:usually there's like these high highs and low lows with these wild ideas you finish them you're on a high but afterwards we've talked to a lot of athletes and there's like a little bit of a low or a big low how do you deal with them yeah the high highs and the low lows i think are part of the reason that we do this i i try to figure out why i put myself in these places and in these challenges and i think they make me feel alive because you are going to feel the highest of highs And then eventually you're going to have those lowest of lows. And sometimes they come after you finish a big challenge.

16:20I, I don't know. I just feel relief that I got it done to be honest. And I know that there'll be other challenges in the future. One of the swims that I did, I thought this was really interesting. The North channel logistically, they were just fantastic to communicate before the swim and even during the swim and after the swim. One of the things they did is for each one of these, we have like a federation and a a boat that we pay the boat pilot to take you across and included in that price. We had a couple of sessions with a therapist to talk about the issues coming up. And that's, that's because, you know, you might, you might train for years on a swim.

16:58And what happens if you don't finish the swim, you're probably going to be pretty bummed. Or if you do finish the swim, maybe you don't get the recognition that you thought you might, Or you might not internally feel that sense of accomplishment that you were kind of hoping for, that you trained years for and whatnot.

17:24Rob Lea:You'd like to feel alive. I want to hear more about that. Like what makes you feel alive? I think it's pretty easy in our lives nowadays to, to go from our air conditioned house to our air conditioned car to the air conditioned office, and then all the things in between and just stay in a real comfort zone. Um, and for me at some point, I think I probably get a little bit bored with the comfort zone and there's a lot of ways that I could get that adrenaline rush and maybe get outside of the comfort zone. But I think doing these athletic challenges give me the endorphins to feel alive. As we talked about, it gives you the highest of highs.

18:05And yes, you are going to get those lowest of lows. But I'll take those lowest of lows to experience those highs on the summits or even in the tent at Camp 2 on Everest.

18:20Rob Lea:In order to climb big mountains and swim long distances, you have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. At altitude, Rob had to deal with limited oxygen and the rapid decline of his own body. Swimming was another thing entirely. There was dangerous sea life, changing currents, and extreme sun exposure. When Rob swam, he slathered on Desitin, a zinc-based diaper cream for sun protection, since sunscreen wears off in the ocean after just a couple of hours. In terms of gear, he was only allowed to wear a swim cap, goggles, a Speedo, and a magnetic bracelet that can help deter sharks. When he finished a swim and emerged from the water, Rob's body was swollen and his mouth was raw from the sea salt.

19:08Rob Lea:Imagine experiencing all of this on your first swim and still deciding to do it six more times. When we talked to Rob, he had just finished his seventh crossing just a few weeks earlier, and it was all very fresh in his mind.

19:26The last swim was the Suguru Strait between the two main islands of Japan. So I was swimming from Honshu to Hokkaido. So it was the only one of these challenges that I've attempted and I didn't get on the first try. I tried it in 2023. They had some really weird rules that year. And I guess kind of a combination of factors, I wasn't able to make it. So they were going to pull me at 10 hours in. And I said, well, if you're going to pull me anyway, then I'm going to get out. So I got out after eight and a half hours and I had to go back and do that one. And so, you know, going into my last of the 14 events in the last of the ocean seven, I was going up against a swim that I had failed at before.

20:07So of course that's in the back of my mind on the other end of the spectrum, I had completed six of the ocean seven. So I knew it was in me to, to finish the swim, but you're always going to have the doubts creep in. It was also the first swim since Molokai when I got siped. So I was a little anxious about the fact that I could, you know, get this fluid in my lungs. And again, there was, I would say more anxiety going into this last swim than the other ones. I also went into it, not all that well-trained if I'm honest. And I say that in the sense that I, again, I rely on the years and a lifetime of training.

20:45When I was about a month out from the swim, I got strep throat. And so that wasn't good for training. And then I got on an antibiotic. Well, the antibiotic gave me something called C. diff, which sometimes the antibiotics can kill all the good bacteria and whatnot in your, in your GI system. So I got this thing called C. diff, um, which I can just explain by saying I had to use the bathroom very, very often, and I couldn't get on any kind of a regular training, uh, regime. So the whole month leading up to my last swim where I really wanted to be prepared mentally and physically, I certainly didn't get the training block that I was looking for.

21:28And I had to rely on that previous training and just my confidence from the other swims that, uh, that once I get in the water, anything can happen and I'm going to give it my best shot. And that's the way that I go into all those swims. I am usually not that confident as I jump in the water. and then after about an hour, I'm usually feeling like, wow, okay, I'm feeling pretty good. Feeling one with the ocean. I feel great. I think in the video after an hour, I went, wow, that was an hour already. And then I even say the same thing after three hours. I said, that was a snappy little three hours.