Rob Lea entered the Tsugaru Strait just after 4 a.m. on June 30. The strait separates Honshu from Hokkaido, and the rules that govern its crossing are strict. No wetsuit or touching the boat. A Speedo, goggles, and a cap in 60-degree water. When he reached the far shore 11 hours and 44 minutes later, he became the first person to complete both the Seven Summits and the Oceans Seven, a combination the endurance world calls the Double Seven.
The two halves of the record measure different kinds of rarity. According to the Daily News of Open Water Swimming, which tracks the sport's records, 348 people have climbed the highest peak on each continent since Richard Bass finished the first Seven Summits in 1985. Lea is the 44th person to complete the Oceans Seven. No name appeared on both lists until June 30.
Lea sells real estate in Park City. He was a sprinter in high school and college, then a professional triathlete, then an Ironman 70.3 age-group world champion.
The current
The Tsugaru was the only one of Lea's 14 expeditions that he failed on the first try. In 2023, Outside reported, the groups that monitor the crossing halted his attempt after determining he would not beat the strait's 14-hour cutoff, a safety rule that prohibits swimming after dark. Crossing in daylight means crossing in wind and current, and this year the strait supplied both. Three or four miles from the Hokkaido shore, a distance Lea told KSL he could cover in about two hours in calm water, an easterly current picked up and stretched the remainder into six and a half more hours of swimming.
His body was the only equipment the rules allowed him to improve. Ahead of the crossing, Lea deliberately gained 30 pounds for insulation, standard practice among marathon swimmers.
"I am so glad to be done with that swim," Lea told the Park Record.
The ledger
The project began before it was a project. Lea summited Aconcagua, the highest peak in South America, in January 2009, and Denali in 2010. He told TownLift he had no plan to climb the Seven Summits at the time.
The plan arrived in 2017, after an ankle injury required major reconstruction and a doctor told Lea to stop running. He needed a rehab goal that spared his legs, and he picked the English Channel. He swam it in July 2019, 45 days after summiting Everest, which made him the first person to summit Everest and cross the English Channel in the same calendar year. Somewhere in there, two checklists merged into one.
The rest came in bursts. Vinson Massif in Antarctica and the Catalina Channel in 2021. Kilimanjaro in 2022. The Cook Strait and the North Channel in 2024. The Strait of Gibraltar and Puncak Jaya in Indonesia in 2025. The final climb was Mont Blanc, which he summited and then skied, closing out the mountains.
For Europe, Lea climbed Mont Blanc rather than Mount Elbrus, the peak on the classic Seven Summits list. Elbrus is in Russia. Purists may note the substitution. The communities that track both records have not disputed his claim.
The Molokai Channel nearly ended the project a swim early. On November 25, 2025, Lea spent 14 hours and 36 minutes crossing the 27 miles between Molokai and Oahu, his longest swim, and developed swimming-induced pulmonary edema along the way. Fluid was filling his lungs. He told KPCW that with a few hundred yards left, he did not know if he would reach the shoreline. He finished, spent time in a Hawaii hospital two days later, and took months to recover. Seven months after Molokai, he was in the Tsugaru.
The crew
Lea did not do this alone, and he says so first. His wife, Caroline Gleich, the professional ski mountaineer and 2024 Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Utah, climbed five of the seven summits with him and crewed most of his channel swims, monitoring his safety and managing his nutrition from the support boat. Outside reported that she threw his feed bottles to him on a retractable dog leash, and that when his stroke degraded mid-Tsugaru, she crushed an Excedrin into his next bottle without saying a word about his shoulder.
"She taught me how to dream big and try really hard things," Lea told KSL.
Lea told KPCW the strange part now is the missing checklist. He spent 17 years with a next box to check, and there is no next box. He told KSL the one thing on the horizon is the New York Marathon this fall, which he and Gleich plan to run together.
