the ground surrounded by jolly laughter. My shoulder was an old football injury; it slid back in on its own. The adrenaline coursed through me and stopped any pain. I figured I’d accomplished that one and decided not to get back in. Walked around and out of the arena down the same tunnel I’d come in.
Outside, I walked with a strange purpose. Restless explosive energy pulsed in my palms and shoulders, throbbing right under the skin. Images of the morning’s events riffled through my mind: bright visions that ejected roaring shouts and mad laughter as I bobbed and leaped through the Pamplona morning air. An entire giant arena had just urged me through a daring act on the sand where matadors and bulls danced and died. I kept pondering if it were real. If there was really a place in this modern world of sitcoms and McDonald’s culture where just about anyone could show up and partake in this epic, wild tradition. I actually pinched myself. The up-close sight of those immense bulls—TV does them no justice. Their heads stand shoulder height; they’re incredibly wide; and their necks, backs, and shoulders bulge with enormous, sculpted muscle. They’re fantastically fast, agile, and powerful. I wondered if someone had died that morning. No one had, but injuries hospitalized several runners. I didn’t know any of this at the time, and later I’d realize I didn’t know anything about the experience I’d just survived. In the coming years I would become a tour guide for the run and grow disgusted by people who came to fiesta without any knowledge. Even later I’d realize it was my duty to inform them.
I walked to a café beside one of the large circular intersections that mark the modern section of Pamplona. Inside locals packed the long room. The Spanish smoked cigarettes and cigars as they drank coffee. I found an open space next to a standup counter, stepped up and ordered. A white-haired guy with a camera hung around his neck stood beside me. We started to chat. His name was Ned. He was a photojournalist from London. I told him I was a writer. He asked me if I’d run that morning and I glanced down at my shoes. A dusting of white arena sand clung to the cuffs of my jeans.
Ned asked me eagerly what happened, and over some strong Spanish espresso—I told.
“You must write this!” he urged.
I laughed, then considered it. He told me about the professional runners—a term no serious runner would ever use, but Ned was just learning too. Then he explained about running on the horns, the way the best Spanish runners ran over the centuries. These new concepts shattered my notions of this experience being a once-in-a-lifetime thing. There was a deep tradition on the street of foreign runners who traveled across the world to Spain every year to run. Some became legends.
“I’ll shoot it, you write it.” Ned smacked me on the back. “We’ll get it in somewhere big, you’ll see.”
At the time I was a completely unpublished writer, aside from my small college journal and a few obscure online sites. I figured, what the hell? We walked to the Plaza de Castillo where runners gathered afterward. There we found thirty or so Americans, English, Scots, and Irish standing around in front of a bar named Txoco. I asked stupid questions. “Are you a professional bull runner?” as I scribbled furiously in my little Moleskin notepad that I had tucked in my back pocket. The guys just laughed in my face and turned away. I didn’t know any better. Then a portly Scotsman with white hair and a beard rolled his eyes and answered my questions. I asked about the cows that ran with the bulls and he laughed.
“There’s no cows out there on the street, mate.”
“I saw cows out there.”
“No you didn’t, you saw cabestros.”
“What’s a cabestro?”
“It’s a bull with family jewels snipped,” he said as I diligently took notes. And with that, I began my slow and painful education in the run. The Scot’s name was Graeme Galloway. Galloway was a veteran of more than twenty fiestas, and over the next decade he’d become one of my dearest friends.
Matt Carney became the first American listed as one of the five great runners of a twenty-year span. At the time, he was the only non-Spanish citizen to ever earn that prestigious appointment. The Spanish accepted him as one of them. Before Matt died of cancer in 1987, he made a request that the room he owned, in the heart of town, be left open for any young man who lurked at the edge of the group. Matt asked that his friends bring that young man into the group, and if he had no place to stay that they should give him Matt’s room for free.
After my awkward introduction to the serious foreign runners, they pretty much ostracized me as a nut-job kid who thought he was a journalist. It was a pretty accurate assessment actually. Somber, I lurked at the edge of the group after that. I observed them as they drank and ate in the picturesque Plaza de Castillo well into the night. They hung out among the chrome tables and chairs in front of Bar Windsor. I leaned against the stone archways and listened to the British eloquence. I wondered if they were descendants from Hemingway’s era. I rehearsed in my mind things I’d say to Hemingway’s grandchildren: Your grandfather’s work changed my life. I wondered if they were writers. Some were. Most descended from James Michener’s era. Michener wrote the nonfiction work Iberia in the late sixties, which dedicated many pages to San Fermín. Later Michener published The Drifters, which fictionally chronicled many of the then contemporary Pamplona characters. Harvey Holt partially embodied Michener’s close friend Matt Carney. I knew nothing about Michener’s history at fiesta then, as I hovered in the shadows of the stone archways. Lonely, I watched and wondered what these characters from The Sun Also Rises were talking about. Mistaking me for a pickpocket casing the group, they ran me off a few times. They never offered me Carney’s room, or maybe a guy named Jim did, and I cut him off not wanting any charity. Can’t really remember . . .
Slept in my cold stone bed at Hemingway’s feet and ran the next morning. I did better and strode alongside the herd the first half of Estafeta, never getting closer than about ten feet. Ned kept insisting that I watch a run. I decided to watch the next morning.
OBSERVATIONS
I milled through the busy morning traffic of runners looking for a place to watch. Finally I ended up at the curve. Two small, unoccupied balconies hung above the barricades where the bulls crashed most mornings. Small, closed wooden windows stood behind the balconies. I scaled the fencing as the photographers and television crews set up on the scaffolding. First I stood on top of the fencing, reached up and grabbed the steel bars of the closest balcony. Then I pulled myself up and climbed in. It was just big enough for one person to squat in. Some of the people watching clapped. I smiled and waved down to them and tried to get comfortable.
I didn’t know at the time, but a very special breed of bulls was set to run that morning. They came from a ranch called Jandilla. The Jandilla weren’t so famous yet, but this bloodline began to impress their legacy on Pamplona the year before. The Jandilla were huge and muscular like most bulls that come to Pamplona, but they also possessed astonishing speed and insane ferocity. They inflicted twenty gorings the morning of July 12, 2004. A runner named Julen Madina received eight of those wounds. By then, Julen Madina had established himself as one of the greatest runners of all time; he’d run on the horns of bulls in Pamplona for over thirty years. Running on the horns is the act of leading the animal by running in front of its face and horns. If done successfully the animal accepts you as its guide and follows you up the street. Madina famously ran on the horns of bulls all the way from La Curva to the bullring in one morning. That’s over 400 yards with the herd—a superhuman feat. Afterward the media dubbed him one of Los Divinos, divine mozos who run with outstanding grace and bravery. If you look over the footage of the past few decades, you’ll see him most mornings in Pamplona, wearing white, his round head shaved and small hoop earrings in both ears, running the end of the course, bringing the bulls into the arena.
The most dangerous situation in bull running is something called a montón, or
