Rob Lea Turns into First Individual to Full “Double Seven”

“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 inexperienced with zinc paste.

This scene performed out on June 30, when Lea, 44, swam throughout the Tsugaru Strait within the Sea of Japan, which connects the island of Honshu to Hokkaido, over the course of 12 hours.

The open-water swim was the ultimate leg of a problem that Lea, a realtor and endurance athlete, has spent the final 17 years working towards.

Lea is believed to be the first person to complete each the Seven Summits and the Oceans Seven, often called the Double Seven. Lea believes he’s the primary particular person to ever full a problem known as the “Double Seven,” which includes each mountaineering and open-water swimming challenges. He climbed the Seven Summits, the best peaks on the entire continents. He additionally accomplished the Oceans Seven, an open-water problem that requires swimmers to finish unassisted solo crossings of seven iconic ocean channels.

Only some 44 people have ever completed the Oceans Seven; a number of hundred have completed the Seven Summits—and till now, no person has completed each, in line with 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 had been chafed uncooked, and his mouth, after almost 12 hours of saltwater publicity, was uncooked and swollen. “The saltwater just kind of eats away at the inside of my mouth,” he says to me over a video name 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 almost 23,000 toes, years earlier than the Oceans Seven and Seven Summits had been even on his radar. He got here up with the concept for the “Double Seven” in 2017, after an ankle harm despatched him into surgical procedure and a health care provider advised him to cease operating. He wanted a objective to encourage his rehab, so he set his sights on swimming throughout the English Channel.

Lea’s last swim was the Tsugaru Strait, which separates Japan’s essential island of Honshu from Hokkaido. He had tried the swim as soon as earlier than in 2023. Regulatory teams who monitor the crossing halted his effort after figuring out he wouldn’t beat their 14-hour cutoff, a security measure that prohibits evening swims. Swimming in the course of the day, although, brings stronger winds and currents. This time, he entered the water at 4:09 A.M. and completed 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 present reached round 4.7 knots at instances, dragging him parallel to the coast, away from his objective. He stored swimming, hoping the present would launch him. His first emotion after ending “was just relief.”

Lea hasn’t completed it alone. His spouse, skilled ski mountaineer Caroline Gleich, climbed 5 of the seven summits with him and crewed most of his channel swims from a assist boat. She blended his liquid feeds and threw the bottles to him on a retractable canine leash. When Gleich observed his arm wasn’t clearing the water the best way it normally does on the Tsugaru crossing, she didn’t ask about his shoulder. She pulverized an Excedrin and blended it into his subsequent 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 folks practice for one excessive surroundings, however Lea skilled his physique to adapt to each mountain and open-water environments. In 2019, Lea climbed Mount Everest after which swam the 21-mile English Channel 46 days later. The turnaround time required him to achieve 30 kilos on a weight loss plan of pizza and heavy cream. In frigid water, carrying solely a Speedo, physique fats is insulation. He knew he might swim the gap; the actual 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 had been different hazards too. Jellyfish stung him greater than 100 instances throughout his Channel crossing. He nearly got here to understand 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, the place he will be seen swimming face-first into one.

Trouble within the Ka’iwi Channel

Seven months earlier than his last swim, Lea spent over 14 hours crossing the 27-mile Ka’iwi Channel. Cookiecutter sharks within the channel’s deepest waters have taken to biting swimmers, so organizers required him to swim the deepest part in daylight, buying and selling shark threat for top winds, chop, and present.

When the swim bought onerous, Lea leaned on a mantra: “54, 54, 54.” That was the variety of hours marathon swimmer Sarah Thomas spent finishing her four-way nonstop swim throughout the English Channel in 2019. “I can swim for another hour, two, three, five if I have to,” he advised himself.

Six hours after ending, he was in a hospital with swimming-induced pulmonary edema, a harmful buildup of fluid within the lungs. “As I was swimming, I was in essence drowning in my own fluids,” he says. A full restoration took three months.

“I Feel More Alive”

For Lea, the motivation is the vary of feelings and expertise. “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 journey immerses him within the deep historical past of the English Channel, one other within the solitude of a month in Antarctica on Vinson Massif, one other within the hustle of the Strait of Gibraltar, one of many world’s busiest delivery lanes.

He hopes the undertaking pushes folks towards their very own scary targets. “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’s wanting ahead to relaxation and to deciding what is going to make him uncomfortable subsequent.