Park City athlete Rob Lea conquers North Channel swim

Rob Lea swims the North Channel between Northern Ireland and Scotland on Aug. 29, 2024. Photo: Tommy Joyce // @tjtriage

In a testament to human perseverance, endurance athlete Rob Lea conquers the treacherous North Channel swim, inching closer to completing the Oceans Seven challenge while his wife campaigns for Senate

PARK CITY, Utah — While his wife Caroline Gleich campaigns for Utah’s Senate seat, local endurance athlete Rob Lea is making waves of his own. On August 29, Lea made the arduous swim across the North Channel. This swim marks the fourth of his major channel crossings, and for Lea, this was the most challenging of them all. 

Lea’s first open swim endeavor was the English Channel back in 2019. The English Channel is renowned for being one of the most challenging and iconic open-water swims in the world involving cold water temperatures, strong currents, and unpredictable weather. Swimmers often face waves, tides, and even encounters with marine life.

The North Channel, according to Lea, held even more physical and mental taxes.

“It’s a lot colder, the jellyfish are a lot worse, and the currents are a lot worse,” Lea said. “There are a lot of currents in the English Channel, but they push you more side to side, [but on the North Channel] I swam against the current for hours on end at the end of this one, which is what made it so so difficult.”

The North Channel is also known for its Lion’s Mane jellyfish – one of the largest jelly species in the world. Lea recalled some initial stings in the beginning of the swim, but the last two hours, he got the brunt of them. Strong currents added the extra dynamic of going nowhere fast. 

“You stop in the North Channel for 30 seconds or a minute, in some of those currents, and it’ll sweep you back like a half mile or more,” Lea said.

So far, Lea has swam the English Channel (2019), Catalina Island to Long Beach (2021), Cook Strait (2024) and the North Channel. However, Lea’s experience goes back to when he was four years old and fought to get on the swim team, a year before he was allowed to at the Racquet Club in Park City (now the MARC). 

His skills took him from swimming on the Park City High School team all the way to the college swim team at UC Davis. Lea proceeded to push his competitions into multi-sport attempts with triathlons, half iron-mans, and finally to full iron-mans. In 2012, Lea earned the title of Half Ironman World Champion for his age group. 

Years of intense athletic competition had taken their toll on Lea’s body and by 2017, recurring ankle issues stemming from a fibula fracture and ligament sprains forced him to seek a doctor. The diagnosis was clear: Lea needed ankle surgery and would have to abandon running altogether.

“I knew what was coming,” Lea said. “I was literally sitting on the doctor’s table, and I’ve been in this position so many times before, and I knew I needed something to get me through rehab – a goal out in the future. So I thought, ‘I’ve been a swimmer my whole life… I’m going to try to swim the English Channel.’” 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Rob Lea (@rob.lea)

Lea immediately went home to research, and found a blog about what is harder, climbing Mount Everest, or the English Channel. “I’ve always wanted to climb Everest as well. So I thought, ‘I wonder if anyone’s ever actually done the two to really compare.’ Turned out there were nine people who had done it, but it was always spread out by years.” So, Lea decided he would try to do them in one calendar year. The challenge is called the Peak and Pond. But Lea didn’t stop there.

“Because of my triathlon days, I thought that if Everest is kind of my run, and I have my swim, I should have a bike in there as well, and I can make my own ultimate triathlon. I’d always wanted to bike across the country. So, in 2019 that’s what I did,” Lea said.

Lea and Gleich climbed Mount Everest. Forty seven days later, he swam the English Channel. Then he rode his bike from Anacortes, Washington to Nantucket. He did it all in a 6-month period, while also getting married in between. 

If that wasn’t enough of an accomplishment, now, Lea’s completed four of the seven long distance open swims in the Oceans Seven challenge. The last three on the list are: the Kaiwi Channel, which is a 26-mile trek between Molokai and Oahu, the Tsugaru Strait which is 12.1 miles between Honshu and Hokkaido, Japan, and the Strait of Gibraltar a 9 mile swim between Spain and Morocco. While there isn’t a date to swim any of these on the books yet, Lea intends to finish the challenge.

“First and foremost, the next goal is to help Caroline get through this election cycle and buckle down and do that,” Lea said. “There’s one other swim that is very difficult; the multi-channel in Hawaii. That’s the longest one. The good news is it’s warm water, so that’s one thing I don’t have to deal with. But there are a lot of really bad jellyfish like Portuguese Man O’War and others, plus there’s actually a lot of sharks and really rough waters. I would say that one’s considered probably the second hardest of this group.”

When asked if sharks were on his mind when he swam, Lea said, “You kind of just have to put them out of your mind. If you’re thinking about sharks while you’re out there for 11 hours then, you got problems, right? You have to be able to take that conscience and just concentrate on the task at hand.” However, the Molokai channel in Hawaii, Lea says, is another story. Some swimmers have been bitten by sharks while swimming that section, and videos of swimmers in Molokai showing sharks circling them, which ends the swim for obvious safety reasons.

“As soon as they see that they’re going to pull you out of the water, of course. And then you have to start over,” Lea said. “So you could be 13 hours in on that swim – it’s a really long swim – see a shark and your swim is over, and you have to try it all over again. So that one, the sharks are definitely an ever present danger.”

While Lea has never had an interaction with a shark while swimming, he has had some incredible moments with dolphins. When Lea was finishing his Catalina swim the dolphins had been with him at the end. “The story is that [the dolphins] are kind of protecting you and taking you into shore,” he said. “In the Cook Strait as well, they were in front of me, and six feet underneath me, twisting and twirling and swimming with me. And that was an absolutely special moment.”

Between the long distances, frigid temperatures, tidal currents, and marine wildlife, the swim is not just about physical prowess, but mental. The North Channel provided all of the above. With a 21 mile length, an average of 56 degrees water temperature, head on currents, and heavy jellyfish encounters, mental strength was the hardest part for Lea.

The last two hours of the swim, according to Lea, was the most challenging. The currents had gotten worse, and the jellyfish were all over the place. Throughout the swim, Lea’s team would give distance and time checks every half an hour to gauge time, and how far he is from the shore.

“I would swim for a half hour, almost as hard as I can, and then check in with them, and I’ve barely made any progress. It is the most frustrating thing you can imagine,” he said. “In that moment when you swim a half hour and should have swum a mile, and instead, you’ve swum a quarter mile because you’re swimming into a current, it just crushes you inside.”

Lea mentioned that the jellyfish at that point were impossible to avoid, so he and his team made the group decision to not notify him anymore, and he just put his head down, and went. “I would just swim through the jellyfish. So, I’m getting stung, I’m barely making progress, and I’m totally exhausted. Those last two hours were just brutal,” he said.

To cap off the challenge, Lea couldn’t wear a wetsuit. Anyone can swim the channel and wear a wetsuit, but in order for the swim to be ratified by the local and worldwide federations, they have very strict rules on what a swimmer can wear. So, Lea swam in a speedo, cap and goggles.

“The warmth, the flotation and the protection, those are like the three biggest cruxes of these swims. So it is really kind of stripping you down to the bare minimum, in a sense, and putting you back to the original style in which swimmers did this,” Lea said.

Lea’s swim was definitely not for the faint of heart, but when asked what got him through, he said, “I’m thought about Caroline and what she’s doing right now, and how hard she is working. I thought ‘okay, I can work hard for ten and a half hours, she’s doing this campaign for ten and a half months.’” 

The swim has put Lea on a delayed recovery this go round, as the salt water, jellyfish and physical push all took its toll. But, it’s not stopping him from his next swimming endeavors, and his advice to all those curious about pursuing open water distance swimming? 

“Starting a swim like this and not being able to see the other side of the ocean that you’re swimming to is just daunting. But, sometimes you just have to jump in the water, start, and see how it goes,” he said. “I wasn’t super confident in doing it, but at the end of the day, I was able to make it. We have deeper reserves than we think. We have a lot more in us than we know. And sometimes it just takes the courage to start and you’ll get there.”