Published on July 4, 2026 04:58 am
“I can’t believe I did it,” Rob Lee said breathlessly. “I am completely devastated.”
He slips over the edge Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, green with salt-crusted and zinc paste.
The scene unfolded on June 30, when Lee, 44, swam for 12 hours across the Tsugaru Strait in the Sea of Japan, which connects Honshu island to Hokkaido.
The open water swim was the final leg of a challenge that Lee, a realtor and endurance athlete, has spent the last 17 years working on.
lawn It is believed first person To complete both the Seven Summits and Oceans Seven, known as the Double Seven. Lee believes he is the first person to complete a challenge called the “Double Seven”, which involves both mountaineering and open water swimming challenges. He climbed the Seven Summits, the highest peaks on all continents. She also completed the Ocean’s Seven, an open water challenge that requires swimmers to cross seven iconic sea channels solo without assistance.
only a few 44 people Have you ever finished Ocean’s Seven; According to Lee, a few hundred people have summited the seven summits and, so far, no one has done both.
After forty hours of swimming across the Tsugaru Strait, Lee was exhausted. “I just want to lie down on my bed and relax,” he explains. Outside. “I really gave that swim my all.”
His shoulders were hurting, his neck and armpits were bruised, and his mouth was raw and swollen after being in salt water for nearly 12 hours. “The salt water eats away at the inside of my mouth,” he told me on a video call from Japan. “It’s like canker sores all over my mouth.”
A journey spanning nearly two decades
The accomplishment caps a 17-year journey for Lee, a Park City, Utah resident and former Ironman 70.3 age-group world champion. In 2009, he climbed Argentina’s Aconcagua, a nearly 23,000-foot peak, several years before Ocean’s Seven and Seven Summits were on his radar. He came up with the idea for “Double Seven” in 2017, when an ankle injury sent him to surgery and a doctor told him to stop running. He needed a goal to motivate him in his rehabilitation, so he focused on swimming across the English Channel.
Lee’s final swim was across the Tsugaru Strait, which separates Japan’s main island of Honshu from Hokkaido. He had attempted the swim once before in 2023. Regulatory groups monitoring the crossing halted his attempt after determining he would not exceed their 14-hour cutoff, a safety measure that bans swimming at night. However, swimming during the day is prohibited due to strong winds and currents. This time he entered the water at 4:09 am and finished in 11 hours 44 minutes.
“It was a tale of two different swims,” he says. “The first half of the swim was going almost too well. I was feeling great. Time was flying by. Then as I passed the fifth hour of the swim, the current picked up and I was basically trying to swim across the current.”
At times the current reached about 4.7 knots, pulling her parallel to the coast away from her target. He kept swimming, hoping that the current would leave him. His first feeling after finishing was “just relief.”
Lee didn’t do it alone. His wife, professional ski mountaineer Caroline GleichClimbed five of the seven summits with him and did most of his channel swimming with a support boat. She mixed his liquid food and threw the bottles at him, attached to the dog’s leash. When Glitch noticed that his hand was not clearing the water the way it usually did at Tsugaru Crossing, he did not ask about his shoulder. She pulverized an Excedrin and added it to his next feed bottle.
“Crossing one of the world’s most dangerous open water crossings in these small boats is not for the faint of heart,” explains Gleich. Outside. “I’m also very tired. It’s a different kind of tired, but also very gratifying.”
“The best way to think about swim team is having someone on a ropes team,” says Lee. “If one person goes down, the whole team goes down.”
From climbing mountains to swimming in oceans
Most people train for an extreme environment, but Lee trained his body to adapt to both mountain and open water environments. In 2019, Lee climbed Mount Everest and then crossed the 21-mile English Channel 46 days later. The transition required him to gain 30 pounds on a diet of pizza and heavy cream. In cold water, wearing only a speedo, body fat is insulation. He knew he could swim far; The real problem was hypothermia. “I spent years in cold baths and cold lakes, doing everything I could to acclimate my body to swimming,” he says.
There were other dangers too. He was stung more than 100 times by jellyfish while crossing the Channel. He almost seemed to appreciate the fuss. “I was waiting for these compass jellyfish stings to keep me awake during about 12 hours of swimming,” he wrote on Instagram, where he can be seen swim head to head in a.
Rob Lee’s Seven Summits list includes Mont Blanc for Europe instead of Russia’s Mount Elbrus, which appears in both the Bass and Messner lists. The continental boundary is disputed. According to a traditional definition, the Europe-Asia line runs along the Kuma-Manch Depression north of the Caucasus, which would place Elbrus in Asia and make Mont Blanc the continent’s highest peak.
Plus, “the reality of it was that it was unsafe to go to Elbrus,” he says. “I didn’t feel it would be appropriate for me to encourage people to go to Russia at this time.”
Kiwi channel problem
Seven months before his final swim, Lee spent more than 14 hours crossing the 27-mile-long Kiwi Channel. Cookiecutter sharks are known to bite swimmers in the deepest waters of the channel, so organizers asked them to swim in the deepest part during daylight hours to avoid the danger of sharks caused by strong winds, erosion and current.
When the swim got tough, Lee resorted to a mantra: “54, 54, 54.” That’s how many hours marathon swimmer Sarah Thomas spent completing her four-way nonstop swim across the English Channel in 2019. He said to himself, “I can swim another hour, two, three, five hours if I have to.”
Six hours after the finish, he was in the hospital due to swimming-induced pulmonary edema, a dangerous accumulation of fluid in the lungs. “When I was swimming, I was literally drowning in my own fluid,” he says. It took three months to fully recover.
“I feel more alive”
For Lee, inspiration ranges from emotion and experience. “You go from the lowest level to the highest level, and sometimes it can happen in a snap of the fingers,” he says. “I feel more alive when I do these things.” One adventure immerses him in the deep history of the English Channel, another in a month-long solitude in Antarctica on the Vinson Massif, another in the hustle and bustle of the Strait of Gibraltar, one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.
He hopes the project will push people toward their horror goals. “We all have that dream that feels scary, that mountain you see out your back window,” says Gleich. “I hope it inspires people to put that date on the calendar and turn their dreams into plans.”
For now, Lee says he’s looking forward to relaxing and deciding what will make him uncomfortable next.
