Advice You Can Trust
There’s a plethora of advice out there on how to run with the bulls; from books, to blogs, to people you meet – everyone wants to share their advice and it’s difficult to know whose you can trust. Running of the Bulls, Inc. solved this problem by partnering with well known runners; experts in bull running whose stories have been well documented through publications and news. All of our content has been reviewed by actual, experienced bull runners.
Meet The Team
Dennis Clancey
At a mere 49 runs (in Pamplona), Dennis could be considered a newbie, in comparison to other widely known runners, but his technique and consistency make him a stand-out runner on the course each morning. There is no non-Spanish bull-runner to be found ‘running on the horns of the bulls’ more often that him on the streets today.
Dennis Clancey was a captain in 101st Airborne Division, served in Iraq, and then came to Pamplona. The word fearless is often used about filmmakers, but since Dennis took up that profession it is justly applied: by his own account he started bull-running himself in case no one else could provide the sequences he wanted for his documentary on San Fermín, Chasing Red, which won the grand prize at the LA Indie Film Festival in 2015. In the same year, Dennis was Esquire Network’s Bull Run Expert for the daily broadcast of the run.
Dennis works for Team Rubicon, a non-profit organization which utilizes the skills and experiences of military veterans with first responders to rapidly deploy emergency response teams around the world to provide humanitarian and disaster relief.
Alexander (Xander) Fiske-Harrison
As part of his researches in 2009 Xander began running with the bulls in Pamplona, and continued to do it across the rest of Spain, including the encierros, ‘bull-runs’, of the Navarran towns of Tafalla and Falces – where the run is down a mountain path beside a sheer drop called ‘El Pilón’ – in the Madrid suburb of San Sebastián de los Reyes and the ancient castle of Cuéllar in Old Castile, which hosts the oldest encierro, ‘bull-run’ in Spain. The book The Bulls Of Pamplona (Kindle Version) has become an essential guide for anyone who wants to run with the bulls in Spain.
For his first book Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight, which was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2011, Xander became a bullfighter. He has written for various newspapers and magazine including The Times, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement, GQ The Spectator, and Prospect and has been himself featured in magazines such as Condé Nast’s Tatler. He has been interviewed and provided commentary on various broadcast media outlets including the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, Discovery Channel, US National Public Radio. and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation National Radio.
Xander studied biological sciences and philosophy at the University of Oxford and as a postgraduate at the University of London. Xander has a lifelong interest in conservation, and has written extensively on the related subjects of animal intelligence and animal welfare. He is currently researching wolves, dogs and human-canine interactions and common history for a book provisionally titled The Land Of Wolves.
Bill Hillmann
Bill has run with the bulls in Pamplona each year since 2005, originally inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s book The Sun Also Rises. In the summer of 2016, he ran with the bulls more than 200 times in towns throughout Spain. He has stated that his favorite running of the bulls is the oldest, in Cuéllar, a small town about two hours north of Madrid, where hundreds of horsemen guide the bulls 3 miles (5 km) to the town and into the run.
Bill has been described as “the best young bull runner from the United States” by the Los Angeles Times. Hillmann has written about the running of the bulls for VICE, NPR, Daily Mail, Toronto Star and various others. His writing on the bulls has won awards in the USA and Spain. He has given expert commentary on the running of the bulls for CNN, The Today Show, CBS This Morning, BBC World Service, and Esquire Network.
On July 9, 2014, a bull gored Hillmann twice in the thigh at the festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, but he returned to bull-running in Pamplona in 2015, and published his memoir, Mozos: A Decade Running with the Bulls (Kindle Version). In 2017 a bull gored Hillmann for the second time, he checked himself out of the hospital and ran again two days later, The Today Show called this feat “Incredible”. When he doesn’t run with the bulls, he works as a journalist, storyteller and author and he is a PhD student at the University of Louisiana Lafayette, where he teaches English 101 and 102.