Why running with the bulls is more than a deathwish

On his fourth trip to San Fermín in Pamplona, Joseph S Furey explains what drives thousands of people to risk their lives running from enraged fighting bulls every year

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/active/11774872/Why-running-with-the-bulls-is-more-than-a-deathwish.html

(by Joseph S Furey telegraph.co.uk 7-31-15)

The sun is bouncing off the cobblestones where I join a crowd that stretches as far as the street climbs in one direction and down to a police cordon in the other. We could pass for protesters, except you wouldn’t want to put what’s inside our heads on a placard. Nerves are jangling, and the tics that men use to cover that up – cracking knuckles, making lame jokes – are very much in evidence.

The jitters are forgivable. We know what’s coming. Although we don’t really, not precisely. This is an unpredictable business. We look at our phones and watches for a final time.

At 8am a rocket sounds. A gate opens in our heads, and nightmares briefly swarm. A few beats later a second rocket goes off, and panic takes over. Before we know it they’re upon us, although we don’t see them immediately. The first wave is human, and that wave breaks when its legs give out, unable to outrun six peak-condition fighting bulls and their guiding steers.

In turn, we move, scattering like thrown dice, trying our luck, some of us ahead of the herd for meaningful seconds, others falling, under feet and hooves, or flattening themselves against the wall, wishing they were shadows or smoke. A glancing blow from one of these horns will open you up like a present. And so it continues, section by section for just over half a mile, the bulls averaging half a ton and 15mph – even on these winding streets – and the runners, ordinary Joes and athletes alike, hoping that whatever god or philosophy they cling to is paying attention. And that medical help is standing by.

That’s right, I’m in Pamplona, in the Navarre region of Spain, on the second day of the 425-year-old festival of San Fermín, which is held each year from July 6 to July 14 and has the encierro, or bull run, at its heart. There is a run each morning from July 7. It starts at the foot of Calle Santo Domingo, where the bulls are released from their holding pen to chase a couple of thousand people for between two and five minutes, and finishes in the bullring, where the bulls meet their end that afternoon. The run has followed this route since 1852.

Foreign news coverage of the event is generally cartoonish, recounting – often with ill-concealed relish – the gorings and hospitalisations of the runners (there have been 16 fatalities since 1910), and painting Pamplona as an open asylum where idiocy and cruelty combine, to the disgust of anyone interested in animal rights. Despite the growing popularity of bullrunning as an extreme sport among foreigners, the Spanish still generally make up the lion's share of the participants. But the festival is more than its displays of foolhardiness, as indeed it would have to be to account for the number of people who return to it year after year.

I’m one of those recidivists. I’ve clocked up three visits, which in San Fermín terms means I’m still cutting my teeth, but I consider myself a lifer. When I’m asked about its appeal, outside of fiesta, I hum and haw, as though I don’t want to expose its magic to the cold light of day. But once I’m there, answers come easily. Of course, no one puts the question to me here because they’re here too, full of the same answers.

For nine days a sedate, conservative town of about 200,000 people is taken over… by itself. It opens wide and never closes. The veil is drawn back. Yes, the streets are awash with wine and patxaran, but also with fireworks, marching bands and dancing giants. It’s a Club 18-months-to-90 holiday, without a fist-fight in sight. (The 3,500-strong police presence doubtless helps.)

This extraordinary act of self-possession, in honour of a saint who, legend has it, was tied to a bull by his feet and dragged to his death, is witnessed by more than a million visitors a year. Its traditions run deeper than any tourist trap’s, though, so it is the intruders’ job to adapt to them.

Larry Belcher, a Texan rodeo rider turned university professor, warms to this romantic theme. ‘It’s like Brigadoon. It rises from nowhere. It’s its own world, and it changes everyone that stops by. Then it disappears before the regular world has had the chance to penetrate it.’ Larry comes alive when he says this, and he knows whereof he speaks. He has been running with the bulls of San Fermín for almost 40 years.

The Plaza del Castillo, the drawing room of Pamplona, is filling up after the encierro. Families seek coffee in the shade of the arcades, while gap-year students, in states of nervous exhaustion and T-shirts flushed with sangria from yesterday’s opening ceremony, pass out on browning grass beneath pom-pom plane trees. The Pamplonicans are uniformly dressed in their whites with a red sash and pañuelo neckerchief, but the guiris – the not-too-gently mocking Spanish term for foreigners – have started to take a few liberties with the dress code.

Outside Bar Txoco, I’m looking for friends who took to the cobbles this morning. Keeping me company is Geoff Wanless, a painter and decorator from South Shields who turned 50 today and ran as his present to himself. When I ask him what San Fermín is doing on his bucket list, he says, ‘I’m having a midlife crisis and can’t afford a Porsche.’

I do a mental register to keep track of my friends, and within half an hour every runner I know is accounted for, holding their post-run glasses of cognac and flavoured milk. I breathe easier, letting the same drink have its way with my adrenalin, which is still cartwheeling. Nobody wants a repeat of last year, when Bill Hillmann, a fine runner who showed me the ropes when I was a new recruit, was gored in the thigh, just shy of his femoral artery.

It is Bill I see last, grinning broadly beneath his trademark duckbill cap, getting some help carrying a big lump of something. The 33-year-old Chicagoan props it against a table. It’s the stuffed and mounted bust of Brevito, the rogue bull (suelto) that almost did for him. Should the caves of Lascaux ever be turned into a bar it would make an impressive centrepiece. I’ve heard of matadors decorating their bachelor pads with the heads of their worthier opponents, but never victims. Bill has much to thank Brevito for, though. He used his time convalescing to write a memoir, Mozos: A Decade Running with the Bulls of Spain, and he casts his story of personal redemption in the form of the suelto.

‘Running with the bulls turned my life around,’ he says. ‘Before I came to Pamplona 10 years ago, I was in a gang, dealing drugs. Very violent. Totally lost. Sueltos are like that. Cut off from the herd. Full of fear and rage. A good runner can lead a runaway bull back to his herd. I wanted to be that runner. To rescue the bulls that rescued me.’

This may strike readers as sentimental anthropomorphism, but Bill is not alone in this. For every 25 clueless, sleep-deprived package-tour drunks who think the encierro is just a lark, there is a runner who combines speed, cunning and taurine psychology to get the most out of his time on the street and make it a safer place for man and beast alike. (He can use a rolled-up newspaper – a staple of regular runners – to attract a rogue bull’s attention and sprint ahead of it in the hope that it will give chase, neatly avoiding carnage.) That their efforts sometimes go awry is testament to the seriousness of the risks they take to try to make that happen.

There has been a tradition of foreigners running with the bulls, if in much smaller numbers, since the early 1950s. Unarguably the most celebrated of those trailblazers is Matthew Carney, a US Marine who fought at Iwo Jima. He died in 1988 of throat cancer – a disappointing way for him to bow out – but a thronged lunch is still held in his memory every fiesta. His daughter, Deirdre, 37, took up running relatively recently, though women on the course comprise a tiny minority and are usually first-timers in their 20s.

‘This is not a fiesta for “brave young men”,’ she says. ‘It’s a fiesta for everyone – the elderly, kids, mothers. This is a celebration about being alive, a play of chaos and ritual that everyone enjoys. Just because very few women run, it doesn’t mean we’re secondary characters here.’

I ask her about criticisms that Pamplona tacitly promotes an anything-goes ‘festival culture’, and mention the 19-year-old British woman who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by six men in the bathroom of a bar on the second day of the fiesta. ‘I personally feel incredibly safe here,’ she says, ‘but I’m older now and don’t party in the backstreets at 3am. In the 1990s, when I was 18 to 25, I used to get grabbed a lot in the street, to the extent that I realised I couldn’t wear a skirt. Things have improved enormously. There have been huge campaigns against sexual assault in recent years. Rightly so. It bears repeating, we are not the sidekick or accoutrement of men having their fiesta. It’s ours, too. We can run the bulls if we want. We’re not here for decoration.’

At the breakfast tables in Calle Merced a few days later I hear someone refer to San Fermín as ‘Hemingstein’ – that is, a monster of Ernest Hemingway’s making (although it was also one of his favourite boyhood nicknames for himself). English-language writers and filmmakers have been magnetically drawn to the festival since Hemingway chose it as the backdrop to his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, but in the past few years a creative cottage industry has sprung up around it, and bull running in particular.

As well as Bill Hillmann’s latest, this year sees publication of the waggishly smart Bulls Before Breakfast by Peter N Milligan, a Philadelphia lawyer with more than 70 runs under his belt, and the release of a feature-length documentary, Chasing Red, by Dennis Clancey.

Clancey, 32, a West Point graduate who served in Iraq as an infantry platoon leader, came to Pamplona for the first time in 2007, and the desire to capture it hit him hard, though he didn’t know how to. ‘I had no idea. I put myself in the film because as a military guy I don’t expect others to take risks that I’m not prepared to take myself. And I knew I could rely on myself to get a big run if the documentary was lacking direction.’

Would Hemingway have approved? Well, at least one Hemingway does. John, grandson of Ernest, has been running with the Pamplona Posse, a loose collective of long-term runners, encierro guides and ‘whole-fiesta-heads’, since 2009. ‘Many people promote their work during the fiesta because there’s quite a bit of media coverage. It’s logical. To say that San Fermín risks overexposure is surreal. It has been “overexposed” for decades.’

Montreal-based John, a writer and general keeper of the family flame, has never felt an obligation as a Hemingway to run or get involved in San Fermín. His attachment to it is the same as mine. ‘I’m here for the camaraderie, the friendships old and new, the atmosphere of a nine-day party that is both a pagan bacchanal and a Christian festival. And of course, the running of the bulls and the afternoon corridas. I love it.’

The corridas – bullfighting – there’s just no avoiding the subject. For the past 14 years, every July 5, the animal-rights group Peta has protested against ‘the shameless, barbaric spectacle’ of the corridas. It has become part of the festival calendar. The headline-grabbing displays of outrage from Peta are greeted with amusement or indifference by the locals. This year 100 activists wearing little more than body paint created a ‘river of blood’ outside Pamplona’s bullring, the Plaza de Toros.

After watching a triple bill of celebrity matadors – Juan José Padilla, ‘El Juli’ and Miguel Angel Perera – take on bulls from the Garcigrande ranch, I talk to Alexander Fiske-Harrison, an Old Etonian who runs in his school blazer and whose training as a bullfighter is the subject of his book Into the Arena. He is a stone-cold pragmatist with a poet’s heart. ‘I’m often asked, why can’t we leave them alone?’ he says. ‘And I tell them that the wild bull, the aurochs, is extinct. Its closest relative, the toro bravo, pays for its five years wild on the ranch with 20 minutes in the ring, just as the beef cow does with its 18 minutes in the corral or factory farm. And the argument that killing for food is not the same as killing for entertainment is bogus. We eat meat because we like the taste – to entertain our palates.’

Day eight, and it’s my fourth run of the festival. The bulls have been fast and well behaved, though not, it seems, on the days I’ve stayed in bed. The first day, bulls from the Jandilla ranch separated (they normally stick together) tossing their horns – a trait of the breed – and three runners were gored, including Mike Webster, a friend of friends (mercifully, he was able to leave hospital after a couple of days).

I’ve avoided calamity so far but my nerves won’t accept that. I wonder what I’m doing here. I ran my first encierro in 2013, the year I left hospital after having been beaten into a coma by thugs in a London side-street. My daughters half-joked that even multiple bangs on the head had failed to bring me to my senses. The girls are never far from my thoughts, but they are centre-stage right now.
My trouble, perhaps, is that my one fear is a dull death. I think that if I were a bull, I would prefer to perish in the arena, to play my part in some dark art. And that is something I seem to have in common with a lot of people here.

I manage to avoid death, dull or otherwise, but I sustain an injury seconds into my fourth run. With a pair of horns a couple of feet from my rear, I am forcibly sandwiched between a heavy-set man in his mid-50s and some external plumbing on a wall. I feel my chest pop, but it takes a day for the adrenalin that was masking the extent of the damage to wear off. I have two cracked ribs, which make laughter – and yawning, coughing and typing – a distinctly unfunny business.

On my final day in Pamplona, after 10 days of swampy humidity, the weather breaks. It’s an Old Testament production. The rain comes down like judgment on cobbles that appear to bear the imprints of cheeks when wet. Thunder shakes its metal sheet. It sounds like a convoy of bin lorries. Or perhaps a herd of Jandillas.