At 6 a.m. on Sept. 5, 2025, Owen Akhibi Herrera realized his side hustle was in trouble.
Akhibi, the founder of New York City-based social fitness group Peak and Pace, had spent weeks planning a 5K run and after-party on Governor's Island, a former military base off the tip of Manhattan that's only accessible by water. He and his team loaded up 18 trucks with supplies, and planned to put them onto a ferry. The morning before the event, he got a call that the boat broke down, leaving the vehicles stranded on Wall Street in the city's bustling financial district.
Worried about refunding 2,000 people who bought tickets to the event, he spent hours on the phone with Governor's Island officials, he says. He managed to get another boat, and the last of his inventory — about 30 port-a-potties — arrived as the first guests got to the island, he adds. By the end of the day, the effort felt worthwhile: Akhibi watched a 25-year-old member place a medal around an older participant's neck at the finish line, he says.
Akhibi, 27, originally founded Peak and Pace as a run club in 2024 while working in algorithmic trading sales for investment bank J.P. Morgan. Running with Peak and Pace is always free, and its larger-scale parties typically require a $15 to $25 ticket, he says. Almost entirely through those parties, the company brought in over $640,000 in 2025 revenue, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
Not every party is profitable, but the company operates overall at a 15% profit margin, says Akhibi, who currently works full-time as the head of partnerships at San Francisco-based AI robotics lab Grounded Superintelligence. He invests the profits back into the side hustle instead of taking a second salary, he says.
Run clubs, Akhibi acknowledges, are a dime-a-dozen, with at least 200 in New York alone. Many of them are free to join, and participation grew nearly 60% globally in 2024, the most recent publicly available data on run club participation rates from run tracking app Strava. Gen Z adults, many of whom are at the age where they're moving to new cities for work, particularly seek out social groups like run clubs to make friends and fight loneliness.
Akhibi was among those Gen Zers, he says, launching Peak and Pace in July 2024 as a way to create community for himself and others beyond nightlife after moving to New York from London. Entrepreneurial from the start — before Peak and Pace, he had a side hustle selling real estate — he always wanted to monetize his club, so he could bring his community to events that cost money like comedy nights or even ski trips, he says.
Using daily social media posts to advertise Peak and Pace, Akhibi grew attendance to roughly 150 runners by its fifth session, after which he hosted a party in a bar in Manhattan that cost about $20 per participant, he says. As participation in the runs grew, so did the parties, featuring DJs and food vendors to justify the ticket cost. Now, Peak and Pace hosts hiking and ski trips outside of the city, too.
Gradually, running the club started to feel like a second full-time job, says Akhibi. "I had to keep performing at a very high level in my [day] job. I was put in a place of high responsibility, and so keeping myself in a good mental mindset was probably the hardest thing," he says. Including his side hustle, he worked 18-hour days for about a year, he says.
More than 30,000 people ended up attending Peak and Pace events in 2025, Akhibi says, which he took as a sign that running his side hustle on top of his full-time job wouldn't be sustainable for much longer. Somewhat serendipitously for him, he moved to San Francisco in March to accept his current role at Grounded Superintelligence. Peak and Pace now has a team of nine contractors who lead its events almost completely independently from its founder. Akhibi checks in during monthly visits to New York, he says, but is looking for a new head of operations to take over.
The lessons he's learned from running Peak and Pace helped him find community in San Francisco, he adds: Making friends means understanding other people, and "working events and dealing with people teaches you [to have] a lot of patience."
Patience can especially help you find common ground with other people, Akhibi notes.
"Sometimes it can get frustrating when you don't understand somebody's point of view," he says. "If you can just learn to be patient and try to put yourself in their shoes, then you become understanding in almost any given situation. It allows you to adapt more easily."
