Wild Ideas Worth Living · Tuesday, September 1, 2026
Rob Lea described his Molokai to Oahu swim as his most challenging and scary, taking 14 hours and 36 minutes, with the final hour in complete darkness. He battled hypothermia, rhabdomyolysis, and pulmonary edema, nearly drowning and requiring hospitalization with diuretics upon returning home.
“But back to Molokai, um, that swim is really open ocean. Um, and so you have these huge swells come through. And it really tested me.”
“But I literally thought I was like drowning out there. My heart was beating so hard, it felt like it was beating out of its chest, and I was, uh, I also had what's called rabdo, where basically your muscles start failing and releasing toxins into your body.”
“It turned out that I had what's called SIPE, which is swimming induced pulmonary edema. And that's when you have fluid in your lungs. And it wasn't necessarily, um, from ingesting water, but this was like fluid in my body seeping into my lungs and I was basically slowly drowning out there as I was finishing that swim, in addition to having rabdo and all these other issues.”
“So that particular swim, um, took me a good two to three months for my lungs to fully heal.”