CHICAGO — If you’ve stayed up this week to watch the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain — where six fighting bulls charge down 927 yards of narrow, twisting road in little more than two minutes — you’ve heard Bill Hillman’s name.
An experienced participant in the event, called San Fermin Feria, the Rogers Park native was seriously gored in the leg last year in an incident covered internationally. This year, as he has for the last 10, he’s back to run again, but this time with a new book behind him: “Mozos: A Decade Running With The Bulls of Spain.”
Gored in 2014. Back in 2015. @Bill_Hillmann at #RunningOfTheBulls 2015. pic.twitter.com/SOzwZ7diCc
— Esquire Network (@ESQTV) July 12, 2015
Near the end of this year’s Day Five run, as the bulls took the last curve on the Telefonica section before the straight shot through the tunnel and into the packed bull ring, the commentators cheered the Chicago native on.
“And here they come round the corner!” their voices rising with excitement. “Bill Hillman, below us! Having a great run, Bill!”
Mark Schipper says the book dives deeper into Hillman's experiences:
This year’s eight-day festival ended Tuesday. Because of the goring and his new book, it has been a different kind of experience, Hillmann said.
“The media’s gobbled a lot of energy and time, taken away from the rest of the party for me. But at the same time it’s been great,” said Hillman, who spoke to DNAinfo via Skype on Monday, the festival’s seventh night.
“I’m happy, everything’s kind of worked out the way I hoped it would after last year.”
The eight-day festival of San Fermina has two parts: a religious festival to the patron saint of Pamplona, and what the Spanish call the "encierro," which means to corral or enclose a pack of bulls and run alongside them.
The running of the bulls, which in Pamplona is a ritual some 400 years old, is as every bit as spiritual as the festival itself and probably the one place, more than any other, where runners feel the real urge to seek out God’s protection.
“It’s really complicated,” said Hillman, working to explain the mysticism of those early morning sprints through the narrow, old Spanish streets.
“It’s about the man and the bull — there’s a very individual artistry to it — when one runner can be perfectly with the bull, a vicious, majestic, powerful animal, and lead it up the street. And there’s this other aspect of sort of running with a group, with a herd. You get to share the incredible power of running with a pack and you almost lock arms and run together in a perfect sort of world,” he said.
The encierro holds a much deeper meaning to the Navarrese, Basques and Spaniards whose old ways, going back to Roman times, provided the materials from which the modern festival was built.
“It really does bring these people together in a way that is profound,” Hillmann said. “There’s maybe only 200 real runners in Pamplona [of an estimated 1 million attendees], because most of the people are too afraid to run. Everyone knows how dangerous it is — but it brings everyone together: children, old people, women, guys who want to run but aren’t brave enough or think it’s crazy.”
Among Hillman’s enduring memories was the morning a man with cerebral palsy, who used a wheelchair, sought him out after a successful run. The man had been posted up next to the course and saw Hillmann sprint by on the horns of a bull.
“He got to me and he grabbed me,” Hillmann said. “He was laughing, just trying to tell me, ‘Your run! Your run!’ I couldn’t believe it had meant so much to him.”
Hillman’s latest book is a memoir of 10 seasons on the dangerous course of Pamplona.
[Courtesy Bill Hillmann]
“It’s basically the story of how I transformed into who I am today: sober, married, happily married, mentally stable, a writer with a burgeoning career,” Hillmann said.
The book also profiles several of the encierro’s great runners, both those he knows of, and those he’s run with and won over.
“The book was sort of me setting out on a quest to become a great runner, and in the end learning and realizing I could never be that,” he said.
This year, as the eight-day festival neared the end, Hillmann was struggling to harness the old magic of the place after recovering from last year's injuries.
“In these sort of extreme sports, something dangerous, it takes your mind, body and spirit to be successful in something that intense. I feel like the goring separated those things, kind of broke the bond between those things. My body healed but I don’t know if my mind has healed or my spirit has healed. I don’t know that they’re working together right now."
True to his experience that everything can change instantly, a new sun seemed to rise for Hillmann the very next day.
Ran the horns of this bull today. After a lot of struggle, safe to say, I'm back! @MenInBlazers #SanFermin2015 pic.twitter.com/nzlPgKI2ji
— Bill Hillmann (@bill_hillmann) July 13, 2015For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here:
