Rob Lea is an endurance athlete, mountaineer, and open water swimmer who became the first person to complete the Double Seven in June 2026. The project combines climbing the Seven Summits, the highest peaks on each continent, with the Oceans Seven, a collection of iconic open water crossings that includes the English Channel and the Strait of Gibraltar. By uniting two of the world's most demanding endurance challenges, Rob set a new benchmark for adventure, mountaineering, and marathon swimming.
Rob Lea is an endurance athlete, mountaineer, and open water swimmer who became the first person to complete the Double Seven in June 2026. The project combines climbing the Seven Summits, the highest peaks on each continent, with the Oceans Seven, a collection of iconic open water crossings that includes the English Channel and the Strait of Gibraltar. By uniting two of the world's most demanding endurance challenges, Rob set a new benchmark for adventure, mountaineering, and marathon swimming.
Connect with Rob:
Check out REI’s 2026 Editors’ Choice Awards
Thank you to our sponsor:
Shelby Stanger:
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.
Rob Lea:
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.
Shelby Stanger:
In June of 2026, Rob Lea 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. 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.
Before we dive into Rob's story, there are a few things you should know. First, Rob is married to Caroline Gleich, a professional skier, mountaineer, and an all-around badass who ran for US Senate in 2024. Caroline's actually been on the podcast before, twice.
Rob Lea:
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.
Shelby Stanger:
Second, while you may be familiar with the seven summits, the highest peaks on each continent, you might not have heard of the Oceans Seven. 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 been competing in triathlon for several years until 2017 when an injury forced him to change course.
Rob Lea:
I had an ankle injury that I went into the doctor and I knew probably what he was going to say, but I was sitting there and he was reviewing everything, looking at my ankle and he said, "Yeah, we should do surgery on the ankle. And also, 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, I 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. 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 slowly dying. So, 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.
Shelby Stanger:
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 Peak and 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.
What was a highlight for you about Everest? What was a big moment for you or a scary moment or a really funny moment? I'd love to hear what's the story that you share a lot with friends.
Rob Lea:
When I think of the moments that I go back to that you can't make this stuff up kind of thing, it would be at Camp 2. So, we would've been at 25, let me think about this real quick. We would've been at 25,000 feet at Camp 2, and in 2019, there was a lot of wind on Everest and it 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, but 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, singing songs and just the silliness of being at 25,000 feet and not being all the way with it. You're kind of half drunk at that altitude and just having the best time of my life, 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 kind of moments, you just live for them when you're in the mountains.
Shelby Stanger:
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 Vinson 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 Oceans Seven. It dawned on him that he could combine the two projects into a completely new wild idea, the Double Seven.
Rob Lea:
Caroline finally looked at me after I think I'd done one or two more swims and said, "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 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, and 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.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay. So, did you guys have a big calendar? Did you have a big spreadsheet? What did it look like?
Rob Lea:
I literally just had a draft email that I had the swims that I'd done and the summits I'd done and then the next one. And I started going through saying, "Okay, this one can be done between these three months of the year or some of them can be done any time of the year." And then maybe an approximation of how much it was going to cost and when we might be able to do it. And I just started ticking each one off and just making a plan to get each one done.
Shelby Stanger:
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.
So, climbing and swimming require really different body types and muscles. 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 this really different, you've got altitude, then you have cold water. There's a lot going on there.
Rob Lea:
You lose a lot of weight when you're at altitude, partly because your body's just slowly eating itself, and I 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. So, 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 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.
Shelby Stanger:
Was there a swim that was incredibly memorable or scary or a climb?
Rob Lea:
Yeah, the first and 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's 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. But 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, and then it got dark on me. So, that swim 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 drowning out there. My heart was beating so hard it felt like it was beating out of its chest. 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 try to take a couple strokes, I might get a couple in, I'd switch over and lay on my back and try to do a couple backstrokes. And 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.
It wasn't necessarily from ingesting water, but this was 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. 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." But 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.
Shelby Stanger:
How long did it take you to recover from that?
Rob Lea:
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. 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.
Shelby Stanger:
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.
A few years ago, Rob Lea decided to combine two classic outdoor challenges, the Seven Summits and the Oceans Seven. Most of the mountains Rob climbed required multi-day expeditions, and the ocean crossings took up to 15 hours of nonstop 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.
Talk to m e about your mental training. What do you say to yourself when you're like, "I don't know if I can make it anymore," or you're getting stung by the 98th jellyfish?
Rob Lea:
Yeah, 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 the 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 chant in my head and that was 56, 56, 56. That 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." So, 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.
Shelby Stanger:
Usually there's 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 a little bit of a low or a big low. How do you deal with them?
Rob Lea:
Yeah, the high highs and the low lows I think are part of the reason that we do this. 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. 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 a federation and 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 because you might train for years on a swim, and 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 hoping for, that you trained years for and whatnot.
Shelby Stanger:
You'd like to feel alive, I want to hear more about that. What makes you feel alive?
Rob Lea:
I think it's pretty easy in our lives nowadays 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 comfort zone. 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 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, and 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.
Shelby Stanger:
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 seesaw. 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.
Rob Lea:
The last swim was the Tsugaru Strait between the two main islands of Japan. So, I was swimming from Honshu to Hokkaido. 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 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. So, going into my last of the 14 events and the last of the Ocean Seven, I was going up against a swim that I had failed at before.
So, 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 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 SIPE, so I was a little anxious about the fact that I could 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, again, I rely on the years and a lifetime of training.
When 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 GI system. So, I got this thing called C. diff, 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 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.
And I had to rely on that previous training and just my confidence from the other swims 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." Then I even say the same thing after three hours, I said, "That was a snappy little three hours."
I felt really good the first few hours, and at hour five, I could see Hokkaido, and I was feeling like a million bucks. Body felt good, mine felt good, water was still pretty warm. Then it was right around five to six hours, the current was, I think they measured it at 4.7 knots, which is like five miles an hour. You can't fight that as a swimmer, you have to let it take you and just slowly make your way through it from south to north as it's taking me from west to east. As it's taking me and the shoreline's getting further away, that's where mentally I started having a really difficult time.
That current probably lasted for a good, I don't know, I'm trying to think, probably four hours. And then right when I got through that current and started getting on the other side of the current, the wind picked up and the ocean got a lot choppier. But also, the other thing that I expected, but not to the extent that it happened was the water got super cold as I approached Hokkaido. So, the water was in the high 50s, which I've swam in that kind of water before, but it's very different when you jump in and you're used to that water compared to if I was used to the 68-degree water that I jumped into at the start of the Tsugaru Strait, and then all of a sudden, it's in the high 50s.
I was frigid at that point and shaking, and you start getting cramps in my hip flexors and other places just from the cold making me constrict my muscles and whatnot. So, that channel, I thought the Tsugaru Strait was going to be one of the easier ones, that was before my first attempt. And then after my first attempt going into it, I thought it would be maybe middle of the pack. I would say now it was probably the third hardest of the swims behind the Molokai and the North Channel.
Shelby Stanger:
So, what was your last swim like? Did you celebrate or were you just absolutely destroyed?
Rob Lea:
It's funny you ask. At the end of the swim, I made it to the beach and I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, I'm finally done." As I said, it was this big sense of relief, and then I look out and the boat is a mile offshore, and after I finished the swim, I had to swim another mile out to the boat in the freezing cold water. So, I swim out there, and then we have another two, two and a half-
Shelby Stanger:
Wait, you could have gone to a paddleboard or something to take you out there?
Rob Lea:
There was a kayaker that came to the shore with me, but if I'm honest, I don't know that he was very experienced on the kayak, and he had a rope. And so, as I got back into the water, he threw me this rope on the back of the kayak, and I held onto it for about literally 10 seconds and realized the water was so cold, I needed to keep moving so that I wouldn't get hypothermia. So, I just started swimming and I swam back to the boat. And then we had two, two and a half hours that we had to motor back to Honshu where we started the swim. So, we've got all that, and I'm just shaking uncontrollably after. That's what happens after almost all these swims, that's called after drop.
So, as I'm swimming, all the warm blood basically goes to my core to keep me alive. And when I get back on the boat, all that cold blood in my hands and feet goes back towards my core, and it makes you super cold for, it could be anywhere between half hour or maybe a couple hours. In this case, it was probably about an hour, hour and a half that I was shaking uncontrollably on the boat ride back to Honshu. The cool thing when we got back to Honshu is you're in this tiny little village, and there's not much there as far as tourism other than these swimmers that come through.
But we pulled up to the dock and there was a bunch of folks, there was probably, I don't know, there was some folks from the Japanese media there as well, so there was probably 30 people from the local town that had these signs that said, "Congratulations and welcome, and you completed your Ocean Seven," and that was really special. Most of these swims, there's no one at the end, so I just get off the boat and go, "Okay, I guess we did it." One other thing I'll bring up that was really fun. The next night after the swim, we went to a traditional Yakitori restaurant, and there was a bar with maybe 12 stools and no one spoke English.
And about five minutes after we sat down, they had a TV on in the bar, and all of a sudden there was a national news segment about my swim on the TV, and I started pointing, and they go, "Lea-san, Lea-san," like Mr. Lea, and they're all watching, and they're all excited, and someone left after that was over, and went and got a newspaper with my article in the newspaper, and none of these guys, it was all guys in there, none of them spoke English, but they were all excited, and it was one of those moments that I'll never forget. To see myself up on the Japanese national news station in this little Yakitori bar. It was really fun.
Shelby Stanger:
Rob's last few swims and climbs were filmed, and he's hoping to make them into a short movie. You can keep an eye out for updates, plus see videos and pictures from Rob's Adventures on Instagram at rob.lea. That's Rob, R-O-B.lea, L-E-A. We want to take a special shout out to a listener named Brandi, who emailed us that her wild idea is actually a healing journey. Sometimes we get injured, right now I've got a foot injury, and sometimes a wild idea can be simply walking out your door to the end of the street.
Brandi, we're thinking about you, and we'd love that you're listening to our podcast while you heal and while you take more steps every day. Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. Thanks again to our partner, Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard. As always, we love it when you follow the show, take time to rate it, and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.