The annual running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, starts every July 7 at 8 am. Usually six to eight bulls are released for the 900–meter run to the bull ring. Originally there was no room to house the bulls. Hence, the need for corralling the bulls at one end of town and fighting the bulls at the other and running the bulls between. The bulls first ran in 1591.

Pamplona’s Fiesta of San Fermin starts at noon every year on July 6, when the drinking kicks off in front of City Hall. By the time the bull running begins at 8 the next morning, there really are thousands who have been partying since noon the previous day, and now it’s time for some frightening fun. The fright and the fun merge every morning at 8 for the week, from July 7 until July 14. I did this one morning, while piles of people keep it up for the whole week.

Until the movie version of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises was released 50 years ago, the eight o’clock runs rarely had more than 150 crazies each morning. Now, the whole world is watching about 10,000 run each morning. The first morning, the opening run, is the most important, and your business editor made it his business to make it. A rational reason to run – and it’s true – is to see your running buddies, the bulls, killed that night in the opening bull fights of the fiesta.
Runners out front and bulls to the rear
Through a tour guide, I got delivered and I got tickets to that night’s fights in the ring, where seats were going through scalpers for 0.

I took a photographer (actually, a New York costume designer) and her dog Duchess with me. My photography crew and I were picked up at our hotel in San Sebastian around 4:45 the morning of the run, and we were dropped off in downtown Pamplona shortly after 6. We had an experienced tour guide, whom I heartily recommend, who showed me and one other scared–to–death crazy in the group where we should wait for the rocket, our signal the bulls were released.

The rocket went up at 8. Another rocket, just a minute later, went up to tell us all the bulls were on the street. We ran like bats out of Hades.

With us was a third American crazy, a practiced bull runner from KY. He told us not to move forward until we heard the first rocket and not to break out with any speed until the second. We waited in a turn of the 15–foot–wide cobblestoned street I dubbed Dead Man’s Curve, where the street forced the bulls and the crazies to first veer left and then take a sharp turn right, all within 50 feet or so. The safe strategy says to always turn on the inside because the bulls tended to turn wide. Firstcomer’s quandary: How do you cross the street in front of the charging bulls to take two consecutive turns on the inside? The answer lay in injury, sometimes death. We did it and we got away with it, and we drank the rest of the day, even while six of my running buddies got the sword in the back and through the heart that night.