Like all good adventures, Rob Lea’s quest to become the first person to climb the highest peaks on all seven continents and swim the world’s seven most iconic open-water channels began while he was on the operating table.

Lea, a Park City realtor, was about to have ankle surgery. Having broken at least 19 bones by his estimate, he knew having something to train for would help motivate him during his rehabilitation.

“Literally sitting on the doctor’s table in 2017 I decided I needed a goal,” he said. “And I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to swim the English Channel — even though I knew nothing about that kind of swimming.”

Today, Lea could be considered one of the world’s experts in “that kind of swimming” as well as the kind of mountaineering it takes to climb peaks such as Mount Everest and Kilimanjaro. On June 30, the 45-year-old became the first person to achieve the Double Seven — swimming all seven channels in the Oceans Seven challenge and summiting all seven peaks of the Seven Summits.

Each climb and swim had to be certified and entered into the respective sport’s official registry.

The quest spanned roughly 139,000 miles of mountain climbing and 124 miles of swimming and took 17 years to complete. Throughout it, Lea was subjected to more than 100 jellyfish stings, at least four earthquakes and two mild concussions. He climbed through minus 45-degree Fahrenheit air temperatures and spent days in the high-altitude “death zone.” He endured a constant assault of saltwater that stung the chaffing around his neck and caused his tongue to shed its cells, and he was admitted to the emergency room with fluid in his lungs.

Not to mention having to eat soggy peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

“Trying to take it all in,” Lea said, “is a little bit difficult to try to wrap your head around.”

Let Sarah Thomas, the first person to complete four consecutive crossings of the English Channel — a swim that took her more than 54 hours — put it in perspective:

“People who do the Oceans Seven are impressive,” Thomas said, “and then you add in the Seven Summits? It’s, like, kind of crazy.”

A challenge takes shape

Lea completed two of the Seven Summit climbs — Aconcagua (22,838 feet) in Argentina and Denali (20,289 feet) in Alaska — before he ended up on the surgeon’s table in 2017. After setting the English Channel as his goal, however, he began seeing chatter online about which was more difficult: swimming the channel or climbing Mount Everest. So, he took it upon himself to settle the debate.

In May 2019, Lea and fiancee Caroline Gleich, a political activist and accomplished mountaineer, reached the 29,029-foot top of the tallest mountain in the world. A month and a half and an additional 30 pounds later, Lea swam the English Channel. With Gleich cheering him on from the safety boat, he spent 11 hours and 49 minutes grinding out the approximately 25 miles between England and France. With the completion, Lea said, he became the first person to complete Everest and the English Channel in the same calendar year.

The very next month, the couple got married at the Snowbird ski area — which happens to be co-founded by Dick Bass, the first person on record to complete the Seven Summits. Lea rounded out the year with a two-month bicycle trip across the country, calling it the “ultimate world triathlon.”

So which was harder, Mount Everest or the English Channel?

“The bike was the hardest,” Lea said.

Lea won the 1999 Utah state 200-meter freestyle swimming championship in a record time and considered becoming a professional Ironman triathlete. So, he can swim. Prior to his English Channel swim, though, he said he was unaware of the Oceans Seven. The challenge was created in 2008 as swimming’s equivalent to the Seven Summits. As of 2025, fewer than 50 people had completed it.

To be officially recognized for their swims, channel swimmers must follow specific rules. They can only wear a swimsuit, a non-insulated cap and goggles — no wetsuits allowed. They also cannot touch a boat or another person during their crossing attempt.

After successfully swimming the channel, Lea decided he wanted to add his name to the Oceans Seven list as well as to the roster of fewer than 500 people — not including guides — who have climbed the Seven Summits since Bass did it in 1985. He said he had “a good sense” he would be the first to claim the Double Seven — and for good reason.

“That is a really impressive athlete that can do both of those simultaneously,” Thomas said. “Just logistically, physically, mentally, financially — all of the above. It’s hard to get all of that done in such a short amount of time.”

Each swim and climb required a permit, which could take years to come through. For example, it took five years for Lea to get permission to swim the Strait of Gibraltar, the 9-mile stretch between Spain and Morocco.

Weather also induced anxiety. Above the mountains and the seas, the skies had to be clear enough and conditions stable enough to allow for a safe attempt. In Lea’s experience, those golden windows were fleeting. On his second attempt at crossing Japan’s Tsugaru Strait last month — the swim that would secure him the Double Seven — he and Gleich experienced an earthquake each day for four days straight. During that same swim, he had to battle strong currents created by a double typhoon.

“You spend a lot of time and money and effort and training to get there. And then you don’t know if you’re even going to get a chance to go for it,” Lea said. He added, “There’s a certain amount of luck as well to get the weather window and all the things.”

Risk around every corner

And when things go wrong, they can go terribly wrong.

Seven climbers died on Aconcagua during the two weeks Lea was on the mountain. Two died when he was on Denali and two more on the Carstensz Pyramid in Indonesia when a group got caught in a heavy rainstorm within days of his summit attempt.

The day before Lea and Gleich summited Everest via a lesser-used north route in 2019, a photo of a Disneyland-like line of climbers waiting to get to the top from the south side went viral. Those crowds were believed to have played a part in the deaths of two men — one of whom was from Utah — within days of the couple’s ascent. They marked the 10th and 11th fatalities on Everest that season.

“Having other climbers pass away while we are climbing is a reality check of how dangerous the mountains we are on truly are. That one slip, or bad luck with a falling rock or a miscalculation on avalanche conditions could easily cost you your life,” Lea wrote in a text. “I think there’s certainly [a] feeling that we have to tell ourselves that it’s not going to be me next... but the reality is that not all the conditions are under your own control.

“And that goes for the swims too. I didn’t have any deaths during my swims ... but swimmers have died on those swims and I think the same logic I use on the mountains applies to the oceans.”

Lea took as many precautions as possible. At times, though, he had to forge forward even when the conditions weren’t ideal. When he and Gleich climbed Antarctica’s Vinson Massif (16,050 feet) in 2021, winds picked up, dropping temperatures to minus-45 degrees — 30 degrees colder than when they climbed Mount Everest. When he swam the roughly 26-mile Molokai Channel in Hawaii last Thanksgiving, he had to do it in the heat and big swells of daytime — while slathered in zinc-rich diaper cream for sun protection — to avoid cookiecutter sharks. The small-but-aggressive creatures come to the surface at night and bit three of the eight other swimmers his charter boat attempted to shepherd through the crossing last year.

The Molokai crossing, also known as the Kawai Channel, took Lea 14:36:00 — nearly three hours longer than any of his other swims. Near the end, he could barely keep his arms moving. The fatigue was punishing, he said. The alternative was worse.

“I can suffer through another, say, four hours or even six hours in the case of Molokai,” Lea said, “rather than have to come back and try this again.”

Lea filled most of those hours thinking about his stroke and monitoring his body for potential injuries. In between, he said he often just watched whatever was happening on the guide boat. There, Gleich would often perform silly dances or call out to him between mixing food for his every-half-hour feedings. At first he experimented with PB&J sandwiches, which inevitably ended up dunked in water. Later, he perfected an all-liquid nutrition system.

Sometimes, though, his mind would just wander. During the Molokai swim, he thought about Gleich’s unsuccessful bid to become a U.S. Senator in 2024.

“When I was watching her during that time, I thought, ‘God, this is getting really long and I’m having a tough go,’” he recalled, “‘but I would much rather be doing this than run for U.S. Senate.’”

Lea paid for his extended effort in Hawaii. Following the swim, he was admitted to the hospital with swimming-induced pulmonary edema. The condition is caused by water entering the lungs, often after extended exposure to cold water, and can be deadly.

Gleich said it was among the most harrowing of all of Lea’s expeditions.

“That was really scary,” Gleich said. “I stayed awake for hours just listening to his breathing.”

Finishing the impossible

Lea left himself little time to recover. He completed the first seven challenges of the Double Seven over the course of 13 years. He checked off the final seven in 27 months.

In that time, he climbed the Carstensz Pyramid (16,024 feet) and Mont Blanc (15,781 feet). He also tackled four of the swims — three of which both Lea and Thomas consider the most difficult in the challenge. In August of 2024, he crossed the frigid North Channel between Ireland and Scotland. The next year, he swam the Strait of Gibraltar a month before his ordeal in the Molokai Channel, which is the longest of the swims.

“Caroline just said, ‘You have to sign up for all these swims and climbs and get this stuff done,’” Lea said, “‘so that we’re not doing this for half of our life.’”

As Lea stood on the shore of the Japanese island of Honshu last month, looking out over the Tsugaru Strait, both Hokkaido and the end of his quest were in sight. Some rules on time limits and routes had changed since his first attempt, making the crossing more achievable. Still, the currents were strong enough to push him sideways and the water was so cold his fingers would lose circulation.

It was the last day of his permit window, though, and if he didn’t finish, his chance to go down in the history books might be lost. So, he kept swimming.

When he reached land, he said his strongest emotion was relief.

“I’m just the same person as I was before I did any of the swims or climbs,” he said. “I probably just know that I can dig a little deeper than I thought was possible before some of these challenges.”