Owen Akhibi Herrera never charges anyone to run with his Brooklyn-based New York club. Peak and Pace, the free Saturday running group the 27-year-old started in 2024, still generated more than $640,000 (£478,000) in revenue last year, almost all of it from the ticketed parties built around the runs.
The company earned that sum in 2025 and operates at a 15% profit margin, according to financial documents reviewed by CNBC. Herrera keeps the venture as a side project and reinvests its profits rather than paying himself from it. He launched the club while working in an algorithmic-trading sales role at J.P. Morgan, and now works full time as head of partnerships at Grounded Superintelligence, a robotics and AI lab based in San Francisco.
Herrera moved to New York from London in 2023 and, struggling to make friends, joined a local church and gathered a few of its members for a run. That first outing in 2024 drew 12 people, and by his own account the group reached about 700 runners within its first summer. Speaking to Leeds University Business School, his old university, Herrera said what began as a casual Saturday run 'has grown into a community of over 50,000 people.'
The Business Model: Free Runs, Paid Parties
The runs have always been free. Herrera has said he set out to monetise the club so it could fund larger gatherings such as comedy nights and ski trips, which now carry a ticket price of $15 to $25 (£11 to £19). Nearly all of Peak and Pace's revenue flows from the parties rather than the running.
The scale of that operation, and its risks, showed on 5 September 2025, when Herrera staged the club's first official race, a 5K and cultural festival on Governors Island, a former military base off Lower Manhattan that can be reached only by ferry. At 6:00 a.m., hours before the gates opened, he learned that the boat booked to carry his 18 supply trucks had broken down, which left the fleet stuck in the Financial District.
With 2,000 people already holding tickets, he spent the morning securing a replacement vessel and managed to land the last of his equipment, roughly 30 portable toilets, as the first guests reached the island. The event went ahead. Not every party turns a profit, Herrera has acknowledged, though the business stays in the black across the year.
Why Run Clubs Became the New Nightlife
Herrera is far from alone in the market. He counts at least 200 run clubs in New York, most of them free to join, which is why Peak and Pace leans on its parties rather than its runs to cover costs.
Interest in the format has climbed sharply. Run club participation rose 59% worldwide in 2024, according to Strava's Year in Sport report, with walking clubs close behind. The same report found people are four times more likely to say they would rather meet someone new through a fitness group than at a bar. The trend runs strongest among Gen Z adults new to the cities they have moved to for work.
Herrera has cast the club as an answer to that isolation rather than a race for size. 'I couldn't care less about building the biggest run club in New York,' he wrote on LinkedIn. 'I care about building one that actually means something.' Alongside the weekly runs, Peak and Pace now hosts hikes, ski trips, comedy nights, and yoga.
Before finance, Herrera sold cars as a teenager, ran a professional esports team, and studied international business and Spanish at the University of Leeds, later taking sales roles at Samsung and J.P. Morgan.
More than 30,000 people turned out for Peak and Pace events in 2025, a figure he has said points to a side hustle that may soon be too big to keep running alongside a full-time job.
