Becs Gentry: The story behind Hoka’s newest brand ambassador

Life wasn’t always Olympic trials and Instagram Likes for Peloton instructor Becs Gentry - it was running that changed everything

Becs Gentry has been named as HOKA’s newest Global Brand Ambassador

It can be tempting to look at someone’s Instagram follower count, their brand associations and carefully curated posts, and assume the plaudits they receive came easily to them.

But more often than not, those garlands arrive on the back of years of hard work and their story started in a far more humble way.

That’s certainly the case for Hoka’s newest Global Brand Ambassador, Becs Gentry.

With a career working with international powerhouses Nike and Peloton to her name, and having raced at the British Olympic Marathon trials, you might be fooled into thinking that running has always been part of Becs’ life.

But the truth is she only found the sport when the pressures of work and a party lifestyle became too much. Running not only relieved that stress, it transformed her life.

From calming her mind by jogging between lampposts on Brighton seafront to quitting her job and diving into a whole new world as a fitness coach, running became central to everything Becs did.

It saw her swap having to run to work in London because she was flat broke for exciting roles at Nike and then, accompanied by a jet-setting move across to New York, for Peloton.

Even then, she was seen by some as simply the ‘Peloton instructor’ rather than a talented runner in her own right. But that all changed when she finished as the first non-elite female at the 2019 New York City Marathon, and followed it up by competing at the British Olympic trials.

Success doesn’t grow on trees or through social media likes, it comes from hard work, consistency and dedication: welcome to the story of how the girl who hated doing cross-country in her knickers became an inspiration to runners all around the world.

The brand ambassador who started with the egg and spoon race:

While Becs has worked with the giants of the fitness world, her first introduction to running has a much more mundane and quintessentially British essence.

Although she was lucky enough to avoid the running as punishment trap which so many schoolchildren fall into, Becs’ initial relationship with the sport wasn’t all rosy.

“In the UK, you start with the egg and spoon race,” she said, “and it goes from there. At school, it was a love-hate relationship. I absolutely hated cross-country, doing it in my knickers and getting muddy.

“And then there was just more of the sports element to it. I played lacrosse and other sports, and running was involved. But very much unlike here in the US, running wasn’t punishment in the UK.

“I hear a lot of US alumni say that running was punishment, and that’s why they hate it. Whereas, I feel in the UK, it was such a pleasure to go for a run and explore with your teammates.”

Despite that early grounding, Becs drifted away from running as she went to university and then moved into the world of work. It was only when she began to seek an escape from the stresses of her career in public relations that she rediscovered the sport.

She said: “At university, it was much more about book-smarts than sport, and that was definitely the case for me. Book-smarts, bars, late nights - doing all the things that don’t fall into the keeping yourself healthy category.

“I found running at a very tough point in my life. I always tell people I wasn’t a well human when running came back into my world. I knew I had to get healthy from the partying lifestyle, and due to a loss in my family. I just realised it was time to grow up a little bit.”

Becs started running to and from gyms where she lived in Brighton and Hove, and would create her own sessions on Brighton’s “beautiful, straight seafront” where she would run between the “ornate” lampposts that can be found there.

“I started running further and further along that seafront, doing another five lampposts, another ten,” she said. “It was a release for me, and I used it as healing, an escape.

“I went to the US to see my aunt and uncle when I was at a very low point in my life. I was in a very, very bad relationship, and my aunt and uncle saved me in many ways.

“My uncle saw my passion for running and told me I had to share it with the world.”

On her return from the States, she left her job and enrolled in a YMCA business and sports diploma. Those were the day when running held her life together, but Becs was now doing something she loved.

“I went into the world of fitness, and running was always the backbone to that. It was the thing that kept me really into it, and I was broke as a button,” she said.

“I interned at the Bulgari Hotel Gym in London, starting at 4am and I had to run to get anywhere. I’d just run through the streets of London, and it was beautiful and quiet and exciting and free.”

Embracing ‘Nemo time’ and sexy pace running:

If it sounds like there was an element of ‘Just Do it’ to Becs’ move into working in fitness, there certainly was with what came next.

It was while working at the Bodyism gym at the Bulgari that she first met the team from Nike, a moment she describes as a “huge break”.

She had been training then-Nike Running UK Communications Manager Jay Goddard (then Jay Stephenson Clarke), who was so impressed with Becs’ passion that she took her on at the sports giant.

Becs started out doing strength classes in Nike stores across London, but quickly “segued into the launch of Nike Run Club globally.

“It spread to 50-plus countries around the world, and it was just a whirlwind of life. I look fondly back on those days. We were running around the world with groups of people, speaking many different languages - not always understanding one another, but moving our feet and having the greatest time.”

Those early running days in Brighton and London were exciting and new, but even as she became steadily more involved in the fitness industry Becs had little concept that she was ‘good’ at the sport.

“Running was something new,” she said. “It was exciting, fresh, and different to anything else that had been going on.

“Things like wearables were out there, but they weren’t commonplace - you had to be a serious hobby runner or cyclist to have a Garmin watch. I just left my house at 6am and ran 25 lampposts one way and came back.

“Instagram wasn’t there. You didn’t have to take a selfie to prove you’d done a workout. It was very much ‘me time’. I was still using an iPod back then with wired headphones. You’d pop it on and maybe have 50 songs to listen to.

“Depending on how long you were going for you listened to most of them twice.

“But it was very much an escape, it was in a realignment of who I was. I didn’t know at the time that was what was happening, but looking back, it had such a positive impact on my life.”

She added: “We didn’t have those comparative devices - phones in hand, a Strava feed. We weren’t stalking people’s Garmin or Coros or whatever. It was more a conversation at the pub about how far you’d run, or how you’d managed 5k in maybe 22 minutes.

“It was that level of running for me and for most people, unless you were a paid athlete. It was a very different world. So, I didn’t really know, and I didn’t really take the time - at that point - to study what was good in running.

“I didn’t think I needed to worry about Olympic times, or qualifying times for different standards in races, because I was just enjoying it so, so much. And that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it as these things did change, but to start with I was in it for me, and just the smiles that it gave me, and the good feelings.”

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Becs’ number one running tip in her own words: ‘Be patient and progress’:

It sounds really, really simple and kind of a cop-out to say, but you have to be so patient with yourself when it comes to progress in running.

If you consider learning a language, for example, there is a quantifiable moment when you can say, ‘hello, hola, bonjour,’ whereas with running it takes a lot more time for your body to make those adaptations.

Anyone who’s ever trained for a marathon knows this. Four to six weeks at the start is joyous, it’s fun, it’s exciting, you are telling everybody, ‘I’m training for a marathon, I’m training so hard, all these miles, I’m so tired, I’m eating everything’.

Then, from seven weeks onwards, it’s more like, ‘oh my gosh, what am I doing? This is terrible. I’m really tired. I can’t run anywhere near as fast as I did two weeks ago’. Or at least you don’t think you can. But that’s your body making these huge changes while also trying to keep progressing.

That’s the point that people fall off the wagon when it comes to running, because they get over the novelty and excitement of this new thing that they’ve brought into their lives, and it gets a little bit difficult. They go, ‘yeah, that’s what everyone’s talking about, running’s really difficult, it hurts, or it’s making me too tired’.

It’s having the patience and the awareness that your body is a whole system, and in order to progress it needs some time and space to make adaptations and to catch up with your brain. Your brain is really, really fast. If our legs could only be as fast as our brains, we’d all be Eliud Kipchoghe.

But it’s not. It takes time to get that turnover happening in your brain to say, ‘no, no, you’re okay, we can silence that panic button’. You’ve just got to work through it, and make that panic button trigger a little bit later, and later, and later, and that’s what happens as you become a longer distance runner, whatever your distance is, because your distance might be a mile, and you might start off with just running a minute every day.

Eventually, your panic button starts to fade away.

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Becs said her love of the sport initially played far more of a part than any desire to make a career out of it or to get faster.

“I knew I loved running, and I knew the amount I was running at that time would mean I’d be doing races,” she said.

“I did half marathons and 5Ks down in Brighton, just to enjoy it. I was there with friends who would drag me into them and I got involved in the Brighton fitness community. I was at a boxing gym, so there’d be a group of us that would do these 5Ks and parkruns.

“But I never really considered that it would lead to a stratospheric leap in my running level and ability, and how much it would change my life.

“I do believe, in many ways, that I was put on this planet to help people move and fall in love with running the way I did. There was some sort of divine intervention taking me out from behind a desk and putting me into the world to encourage people to feel better.”

It wasn’t, however, as if Becs was clocking slow times. She already had a three hour 27 minute marathon to her name when a friend, who went on to be her coach, told her she could be running much faster.

That was when she started to learn a lot more about pacing and methods of training: “I started to understand about the different runs that you should do five times a week, instead of just going out for a run and blasting it whenever you could.

“It was about getting more of the true principles of running and run training into my world. Then Nike opened me up to sexy pace running, and all of the paces from there up to flat-out miles.

“I’m not somebody who enjoys running around the track, but I started to do that. I’d very quickly moved into ultras and endurance running, and was known as the long-distance runner.

“But then I’d be seen on the track absolutely gassed and hating running in circles. I used to call it Nemo time. I was going around in circles, and I hated it.”

Peloton, the New York Marathon, and a challenge unlike any other:

“It’s been such an incredible journey that I could never have written. I could never have foreseen this coming.”

If becoming part of the Nike family was Becs’ big break, then joining Peloton was to supercharge her career.

When the cycling exercise class giant launched its original treadmill, Tread+, in early 2018 it needed a team of runners to champion the product and launch its new running content and training sessions.

Becs was approached in December 2017, and three auditions - coupled with non-disclosure agreements and clandestine flights to New York - later, she was offered the chance to relocate her whole life to America.

“I honestly didn’t know what it was and had to research it because we didn’t have it in the UK then,” she said. “But it was clear they were very successful and it was going to be great.

“From the day the doors opened on the studio back in Christopher Street, down in the West Village, it was non-stop. The ball has not stopped rolling ever since, and it’s just gone to different levels of madness.”

When the Covid pandemic arrived and people were forced to stay in their homes for long periods, Peloton became the training partner of choice for many, combining the chance to exercise with much-needed human connection.

Becs said: “It gave people the opportunity to not feel lonely. The world was in such a vulnerable position, and no-one knew what was happening.

“We were all petrified, we were all locked up in our homes, feeling isolated, feeling very lost in our routines, our friendships, our families. I think having this ability to connect with somebody regularly, who wasn’t in your home, was vital.

“People felt that they were seeing others in a class situation, but obviously they were safe at home.

“I’ve been told by so many people that it was a lifesaver to them during those months.”

Becs taught her classes from her New York apartment, with her partner taking on the role of producer and cameraman, as well as performing the vital role of keeping their dogs from running into frame.

“It was a teamwork effort for sure,” she added. “It helped save me. I was separated from my family. I couldn’t come back to the UK for the life of me.

“It was really, really tough, and I had my job still to do. I still had to show up on camera, which, in a weird way, saved me from plunging into that opening a bottle of wine at 11 o’clock situation.”

She said, despite all the pain it caused, Covid also resulted in a running and fitness boom, with many people rediscovering their passion for movement.

“They were suddenly at home, there wasn’t so much work to do even if you were working, unless you were a first responder or in healthcare,” she added.

“We were all suddenly going back to these more animalistic movements. I had friends who were setting up CrossFit-style workout in their gardens. It was really cool, and running definitely got a huge, huge boost.

“When we were allowed to go out and walk, people would start walking. And then six months later, you would see that same person starting to walk-jog. It was such an evolution of fitness, which was really, really good to see.”

If Becs career was going from strength to strength then the same was true for her own running.

Her rapid improvement is probably best illustrated by two pivotal events: finishing as the first non-elite female at the 2019 New York City Marathon and being invited to the British Olympic Marathon Trials two years later.

That first success came in November 2019, not long before coronavirus shut the world down, and Becs described it as a “life-changing moment”.

“It was an incredible day,” she said. “The self-belief that I had as those miles were rolling by, I don’t know if I’ll ever experience that again.

“Even at the trials, that self-belief did not keep climbing - it waned that day because it was so difficult. But at the New York City Marathon, things just kept getting better. I felt like I could keep doing it, and keep going.

“The power that I had that day was something very different that I’m not sure I’ll ever embody again. If I do get to feel that again, then someone’s looking out for me, but I’m so happy I got to experience it at least once in my life.”

Not only did that run boost Becs confidence, it changed the way many in the running world looked at her. She went from being simply ‘this Peloton instructor’ to someone who was seen as a genuinely quick runner.

That new-found reputation was best demonstrated by a post-Covid invite from the England Athletics Association to take part in the Olympic trials.

Her first reaction was that someone was playing a cruel joke on her, but the opportunity was real and Becs was soon thrown into months of intense training.

“I went out for a run the very next day, and I ran 21 miles, because of everything going through my brain,” she said.

“I’d never been worried about my times. I’d never consciously made a decision to get faster over the marathon [distance], over each race that I did. It had just happened.”

Suddenly, Becs had times and performance thrust to the forefront of her mind, with potential qualification requiring a time of two hours 30 minutes, or a finish of third or above to be considered as a back-up option.

At New York, she had finished in two hours 37, so despite the weight of that achievement she was required to go considerably faster at the Kew Gardens-based trials.

“I’d never gone to my coach and said, I want to run ‘X’ over this distance. That was the first time I’ve had the stress of training and seeing paces on my watch, seeing paces on my treads, seeing paces on my training plan, and thinking, ‘that isn’t happening’.

“And conversely, seeing those paces actually happen, and being like, ‘holy beep, this is happening, I’m getting faster’.”

When the day of the trials came around, Becs was hit with another new and “surreal’ sensation - that of lining up alongside elite, professional athletes.

She told Running Tales: “My first question was, ‘what business do I have here’. But I told myself, ‘you deserve to be here as much as anyone, you’ve put in the time, you’ve proven that you are good enough to be here, otherwise you wouldn’t have been invited’.

“My partner said I had to be the one who breaks the ice, because everyone is, deep down, probably looking at me thinking, ‘it’s a joke, she’s a Peloton instructor’.

“I went on the start line, and I was like, ‘God, I’m so hungover, anyone else?’ So, I had that moment, and a few of the girls, who I became friends with afterwards, said it was just so funny and had helped them breathe a sign of relief as well.”

Despite that icebreaker, Becs said taking part in the trails remained not only really scary but incredibly challenging. The faster she moved, the more she feared she would propel herself forward too quickly and end up plummeting forward into the pathway.

“I was worried I was going to be missing all my teeth in a hot second,” she said. “I left it all on the line, and Rosie [Edwards] came up behind me and took third place in the last five meters.

“She was screaming at me to keep running. She did not want to pass me, but I just had nothing. It was all gone. But I will never not be proud of that moment. I know I left it all on the line.”

Becs finished in fourth, with a personal best time of two hours, 32 minutes and one second.

“It felt really good,” she added, “and the next day was my 36th birthday, so I was really, really proud to wake up that morning.

“I’d always said I wanted to do something special, or I believed something special in running would happen to me around my 36th birthday.

“I ran the fastest I’d ever run and really showed up. It was super cool to wake up on my birthday, and not be able to move for a really good, healthy reason.”

Hoka and Becs Gentry - the perfect partnership:

Becs Gentry has been a Peloton instructor since the launch of their Tread classes

Becs’ journey to Olympic triallist and popular Peloton instructor has taken her a long way from being the girl who ran to escape work stress.

It has seen her gather more than 200,000 followers on Instagram, many of whom look to her for inspiration and to power their own running journeys.

That desire to help others remains central to everything she does is: “It’s always so amazing to pass on true experience.

“The best coaches have those two sides to them. They have the book-smarts, and the education side of things, but they’ve put it into practice, and they’ve felt it themselves.

“For me, being able to talk to people through Instagram or whatever with that genuine authenticity really does help. People want to hear what I’ve got to say, or want to follow my class plans, and to support me when I do take on these crazy adventures.”

The latest of those adventures is her new collaboration with Hoka. As the shoe and apparel giants’ Global Brand Ambassador, Becs said she feels closely aligned to their company values.

Hoka told Running Tales that the partnership will allow Becs to share her passion for running and inspiring others to move: “Becs has earned deep credibility within the global running community as a dedicated road runner and accomplished marathoner, with a loyal following of runners who look to her for guidance and inspiration.”

“It’s so exciting,” Becs said, “Hoka is a brand that represents such a huge community of runners of all different ability levels, all different types of runners, from road to trail and beyond.

“They are synonymous, at least in the USA, with healthcare workers and the amount of doctors and nurses that I see in medical situations, who are just spending their extremely long shifts on their feet wearing Hokas is a testament to the support that this shoe gives lots of different communities.

“It’s such a wonderful alignment for me because their innovation is at the point right now of some really big things ahead.”

It is a collaboration that comes at a time when Becs is set to return to ultra and trail running - parts of the sport traditionally associated with Hoka.

“At the end of April, I’ve got a pretty big 50K race coming up,” she said. “And then at the end of August, I’ll be competing in a very, very big, very, very long race in Europe.

“I’m not letting go what it is right now. I like to keep things a little close to my chest before I let them out there, but it’s going to be a really exciting year.

“I’ve got a lot of ground to cover in the US over the next few months to get myself really feeling that confidence back in trail running. You forget how different it is to road running or even city trail running.

“This will be true trail running, up in the mountains, up in the hills, it’s going to be exhausting but wonderful.”

Exhausting, but wonderful. What better way to describe the Becs Gentry story.

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