A good run

I have just finished running — with a thousand like-minded souls from around the world — down a half-mile of medieval city streets while being pursued by a half-dozen half-ton wild Spanish fighting bulls. They were accompanied by an equal number of three-quarter-ton galloping oxen, but we didn’t worry about them: they know the course as well as anyone and keep the bulls in a herd. This is good, because when fighting bulls are on their own they become the beast of solitary splendour and ferocity you may see in bullrings across Spain, France, Portugal, Mexico and much of Latin America. However, every second week in July, during the festival of Saint Fermín, they are run together as a herd from the corrals to the bullring.

Fermín was a 3rd century ad bishop, martyr and patron saint of this city whose feast day of 7 July has been celebrated here since the 12th century, with the addition of bullfighting since the 14th and bull-running since the early 17th. It was not until Ernest Hemingway turned up in the 1920s and told the story of this ‘bull-feast’ — first in dispatches for the Toronto Star and then in his first novel Fiesta — that the English-speaking world came to hear about it.

Returning to this morning’s bulls: they were an interesting bunch, coming all at once in a clumped herd, scything through the Australian backpackers, the clueless American jocks fresh out of college and the drunken stag party from Chester. In amongst all of these young braves (who quickly and sensibly fled to one side or the other) were a hard core of Spanish and Basque runners, and with them an even smaller number of American and British ones.