SERGE PIZZORNO – I’m a Runner interview – Runner’s World, Jan 2026 issue
At school the headteacher would bribe me to do cross country. As soon as he said: ‘You can miss the last couple of lessons,’ I was sold. But I never enjoyed it. It was too far. I was a footballer who liked short sprints.
If I was ever in a hotel lobby and caught another band with gym gear on, I’d annihilate them for such behaviour. Occasionally I’d be on a hangover and feel I needed to sort my life out, so I’d see if I could still run 5k. Otherwise running was never on my radar once I was in Kasabian.
Hedonism was at the forefront of everything. If you’re not on stage, you’re in a pitch black room nursing a horrendous hangover. We definitely committed to it and had a great time, but then there was a big change.
When I became a frontman, athleticism came back into my life. [Tom Meighan was fired from the band in 2020, leaving songwriter Pizzorno to take over lead vocals.] I had been quite happy with the way things were going, and all of a sudden the train tracks switched and I was on a new path. I knew that there was absolutely no way I could live the life I had been living and perform at my best.
My wife Amy is my running inspiration. She’s just unbelievable.She took it up around the same time as me and now has an England Masters vest as a V40. She’s going for a Championship time for London Marathon. She ran 3:10:03 in Florence last year – three seconds short!
It was champagne that got me doing my first marathon. We were in Copenhagen in 2023 to watch some friends do it, had some big bottles on a beautiful sunny day on the Friday, and my mate Chris, who’s a running maniac, convinced me I could just run half of it – because our hotel was near the halfway point – have a shower then go and see the finish. The longest I’d ever run was about 12 miles.
I think the medal is so important to the psychology of the whole thing. They’re so chunky and heavy, and the allure of having one of them is what got me. I did the whole marathon in Copenhagen because once I was in it I decided, ‘I need that medal.’ I didn’t take it off for about a week. I was picking my kids up from school wearing it.
I was so pissed off with 4:05 in Copenhagen, I knew I would do another one. I went for sub-4 in Florence in 2024 but I was still in no shape. I’d probably done 15 miles once and a few 10ks. After 11 miles I came off the course and started walking back to the hotel. My IT band was really painful. But I knew from Denmark I could grind it out, so I turned around and came back to get 3:51.
I’m now into running for so many reasons. There’s the competitive side of me who’s chasing PBs and can now talk about HRV and Garmins, and there’s also running to be completely free in your mind. It’s a creative time. I’ll stop on the street and record voice notes because I’ll come up with melodies and lyrics, or I’ll have artwork ideas.
I do have to be careful of my obsessive personality though. If I really committed to a proper marathon training block, Kasabian wouldn’t make another album. I’d be in Kenya doing altitude training.
When it’s hard, it’s like there’s a dungeon in my mind, but I like going to that place. There are certain pressures that come along with this job. Going to extreme lengths with running has a knock-on effect that I find so helpful with everything else. If I start the day with a decent run, everything after that feels a lot easier than it did before.
Kasabian perform at Finsbury Park on 4 July 2026.
