You arrive in Pamplona for San Fermines. You’re not sure if you’re ready to run. A thought crosses your mind: I’ll just stand on the side of the route. Watch it happen. Say I was there. No major commitment. Lower risk.
It is a dangerous misconception about the running of the bulls.
Standing on the run route is not a safer alternative to running. It is actively more dangerous, not just to you, but to everyone else on the street. The reasons why go to the heart of how the encierro actually works: the physics of the animals, the dynamics of the crowd, and what happens when something goes wrong.
Encierro founder Dennis Clancey has run every year the bulls have run in Pamplona since 2007 and has personally instructed approximately 4,000 clients, more than anyone in the history of the run. This is what he’s learned about why the people who get hurt are so often the people who thought they had opted out.
The Misconception: Watching From the Street Feels Like a Middle Ground
The logic seems sound. If you’re not running with the bulls, you’re not in danger from the bulls. Stand to the side, let the herd pass, let the runners move, and you’re essentially a spectator. Passive. Low exposure. A smarter version of the tourist who can’t quite commit.
It doesn’t work that way.
There is no neutral position on the run route. The moment you step onto those cobblestones, you are in the encierro. You are part of the event. And what you do with your body in the seconds that matter, whether you’re in motion or standing still, determines what happens to you when the unexpected occurs.
The unexpected, on the encierro, is not a freak event. It is the baseline condition.
The Physics Problem: You Can’t Outrun What You Can’t Start Running From
A bull travels at approximately four-minute-mile pace down a narrow street flanked by wooden barriers. That is roughly 15 miles per hour in a space wide enough for a single lane of traffic, packed with human bodies.
You’re standing still.
If that bull veers toward you, and bulls veer regularly and without warning, you cannot accelerate from a dead stop fast enough to get out of the way. Acceleration takes time. Physics gives you a window of fractions of a second. An animal moving at 15 miles per hour does not give you that window when your starting velocity is zero.
Dennis explains the difference between what standing and running actually give you in that moment:
“If you’re standing still and a bull is running a four-minute-mile pace down the road, you have no forward momentum. And so if a bull comes towards you, you lose those split seconds that you would otherwise have if you were in motion and you had a direction you were going, to be able to get out of its way. But if you’re standing still, it’s very hard to accelerate in any meaningful way away from a bull that’s traveling so fast.”
Dennis Clancey, Founder of Encierro
When you’re already running, none of that is a problem in the same way. You have velocity. You have direction. You have a feel for how fast you can move through the crowd around you. Your body is already processing options. The transition from “running forward” to “adjusting course” takes a fraction of the energy and time of the transition from “standing still” to “running for your life.”
“You want to have forward momentum. You want to be moving a bit because if you have some forward momentum, you have that split second, if you find that you are in their path, you can actually move out of the way because you have some freedom of maneuver. It’s freedom of maneuver that you won’t have if you’re standing along the side and a bull just comes ripping up along the barrier.”
Dennis Clancey, Founder of Encierro
That phrase, freedom of maneuver, is the key concept. Motion gives you options. Standing eliminates them.
The Crowding Problem: You’re Not Just Standing, You’re Blocking
Where do people stand when they decide to watch from the street? On the sides. Pressed against the barriers. Packed in with other stationary people who had the same idea.
This creates a systemic problem that goes beyond personal risk.
“Think about it like plaque in an artery. The more plaque you have along the sides of the artery, the less room there is to move in the middle. All those standing people are kind of canalizing bulls even more, but the amount of crowding on the run route just creates a problem.”
Dennis Clancey, Founder of Encierro
Every stationary person on the side of the route takes up space that would otherwise allow runners to move, adjust, and navigate around each other and the animals. Every standing body makes the entire system less fluid, less responsive, less able to absorb what happens when something goes wrong. You are not a passive observer when you stand on the street. You are an obstruction that changes how the whole event functions.
Experienced runners are constantly reading the crowd, sensing where the gaps are, how tight the press is, what their options look like if they need to react. Running through a crowd before the bulls arrive gives you this information. Standing on the side gives you none of it.
“If you’re standing in the run route, you’re probably along the sides, and the further to the sides you are, the less maneuverability you have because you’re gonna be packed among other people that are not moving. So you lose the freedom to be able to move by being on the side and being stationary… The reason why I always talk to people about being in motion is it gives you a feeling for how you can move through that crowd, what options you have for getting out of the way. But if you’re just standing on the side, when there’s trouble, you’re just waiting for something bad to happen.”
Dennis Clancey, Founder of Encierro
Then a bull appears. And suddenly you need all that knowledge you never accumulated. You need to know how tight the crowd is. You need to know where the gaps are. You need to know how fast you can actually move. You know none of it. Because you were standing.
The Real Danger: When a Bull Gets Separated
Among the most serious scenarios on any run is the suelto, a separated bull, a loose one. A suelto has broken away from the herd. It may have tripped. It may have gotten turned around. It may simply be faster or slower than the others and found itself suddenly alone on the street.
When that happens, the animal you’re dealing with is fundamentally different from a bull running with its herd.
“When a bull gets separated, it becomes a fundamentally different animal. It looks to establish its territory, and it does that by going after the people around it.”
Dennis Clancey, Founder of Encierro
A herd bull is moving with purpose down the route toward the bullring. A suelto is not going anywhere in particular. It is assessing its environment and responding to the threat it perceives, which is the crowd of humans around it. It doesn’t care about the center line. It doesn’t follow the direction of flow. It is actively looking.
If you’re standing on the side of the route with no momentum and no plan, you are, in Dennis’s words, a sitting duck.
“There’s a huge danger, particularly if you’re standing along the side and you have no plan to start running at any time. There’s a bull that’s completely turned around that’s looking for people to go after. You’re a sitting duck. You need to take off running and get the hell out of there in the event you have a suelto, a loose one.”
Dennis Clancey, Founder of Encierro
The suelto is not a rare exception. It is a regular feature of the encierro that every runner trains their awareness around. Standing observers have no such training and no such awareness. When a suelto materializes, the standing spectator on the street has a particularly dangerous combination of attributes: no information, no momentum, and nowhere to go.
The “Bravo” Factor: Even Herd Bulls Don’t Follow Rules
You don’t need a suelto for standing to become dangerous. Even when the herd is intact and moving well, individual bulls can and do veer toward the barriers, toward exactly where standing observers are packed.
Bulls possess what runners call bravo: a fighting spirit, a ferocity, a will to assert themselves in the moment. It can surface at any time, for any reason, jostling with another bull, the irritant of too many humans pressing close, a stimulus no one can predict from the outside. Understanding how the herd moves is essential context for anyone on the route.
“The bulls, we hope, will stay with their pack and run down the center, but they have this quality, we call it bravo. They’re brave. They’re ferocious, really. And they’ll do what they wish. And if they feel irritated because there are a bunch of people around them or they’re jockeying for position with their brothers, I’ve watched countless times where a bull just decides to clear some people out along the side of the route, and those people are typically just standing there, not able to do something about it.”
Dennis Clancey, Founder of Encierro
How often does this happen?
“Yeah, it happens quite regularly. This is not a rare thing. It happens quite regularly.”
Dennis Clancey, Founder of Encierro
Not occasionally. Not in exceptional years. Regularly. The standing observer, pressed against the barrier with nowhere to go, is exactly the person a bull clearing the sides will find.
What Dennis Saw on July 12, 2007
Dennis watched his first running of the bulls from a balcony in Pamplona, the day before he stepped onto the route himself. He wanted to understand the event before committing to it, to see what actually happened before placing himself in it. What he witnessed that morning is something he has carried into every session he has led since.
There was a runner who had decided to stand on the inside of La Curva, the famous sharp bend where the route turns from Mercaderes onto Estafeta. The logic seemed defensible: bulls typically go wide around turns, so the inside felt like protected ground. He was wrong.
A suelto came through the curve ten to fifteen seconds after the main herd. The runner wasn’t expecting it. He wasn’t in motion. He had no time. The bull caught him completely off guard, lifted him into the air, and he landed on his head on the cobblestones. He was bleeding. Runners immediately moved to form a protective wall around him and signal the medics, the practiced, instinctive response of experienced mozos who have seen this before. The pastores, the officials in green who manage the order of the run, were on him within seconds.
That same suelto continued up the route. It found another man standing in a doorway. Not on the course in any meaningful sense, in a doorway, pressed back, trying to be nowhere. The bull gored him through the navel, lifted him over its head, and threw him into the street.
Two serious injuries. Same bull. Same run. Both victims were standing. Both were caught in positions they believed were safe. Neither was.
“The real lesson there being that nowhere is safe along the run route.”
Dennis Clancey, on what he took from July 12, 2007
Not the inside of curves. Not doorways. Not the walls. Not the barrier itself. Safety on the encierro is not a location. It is a state of readiness.
How to Actually Run: What the Route Demands and What It Doesn’t
Here is what most first-timers don’t understand about running with the bulls: you don’t run the entire route.
The encierro is roughly half a mile from the corrals at Santo Domingo to the entrance of the bullring. Running that full distance before the animals arrive would exhaust you before the critical moment. It would leave you spent at exactly the time you need to be alert and responsive.
You pick your position. You conserve your energy. Then, when you sense the bulls approaching your section of the route, you start running.
“You wanna conserve your energy and be in motion when you have any inkling that the bulls might be near to your position. You want to be well rested and most able to do something if something goes wrong. You don’t wanna be exhausted when they get to your position.”
Dennis Clancey, Founder of Encierro
Even within that, there’s nuance. You start running before the bulls reach you, not because you’re trying to race them, but because running through the crowd teaches you things you cannot learn standing still.
“It makes sense that you want to get up to speed before they get to your position because that gives you, particularly if you’re a first-time runner, a sense of how to maneuver within the crowd, what kind of speed you can actually attain. People are only moving so fast. And it allows you to start making decisions about how close to the center of the route you actually feel comfortable.”
Dennis Clancey, Founder of Encierro
That knowledge, how the crowd moves, how fast you can actually go, where the openings are, is the preparation that standing never provides. Positioning strategy on the route is built on exactly this kind of live, in-motion feel for the street. By the time the bulls are at your position, you’ve already had a few hundred meters of practical education in how that specific section of that specific run feels on that specific morning.
Once the bulls pass you, you stop. The city of Pamplona explicitly asks runners not to chase the herd after it has moved beyond them. For runners who know the tradition, it would be considered disrespectful to do otherwise.
The First-Time Runner’s Only Goal
If you have decided to run, Dennis is direct about what you should be focused on.
“The only goal the first time you run is to not get injured or killed, and really allow the bulls to safely overtake you as you’re running down the street.”
Dennis Clancey, Founder of Encierro
That’s it. Not to get on the horns. Not to run alongside the lead animal. Not to prove something or collect a story. To run, stay safe, and let the bulls pass you without incident.
A conservative first run means you’re not positioning yourself in the center of the route where the bulls run. You’re not trying to be close. You’re giving yourself space. You’ve thought through what to do if you fall. If you go down while the animals are near, you stay down, you cover your head, and you let the herd jump over you. You know where the barrier gaps are. You understand that the pastores in green are there to help manage the run if something goes wrong.
And above all: you are moving.
Standing Puts Everyone at Risk, Not Just You
The danger of standing on the run route is not only personal. Every stationary body is a variable that experienced runners have to account for. Every standing person makes the crowd less predictable, the flow less clean, and the options for everyone around them more constrained.
“We have a vested interest in making sure that the people that show up on the run route are prepared. They have a plan. They understand the sequence of events. They understand key things to do and not to do. Because the lack of that understanding on the bull run can create a lot of harm, not only to those people coming to run for the first time, but to the people that have been running for years who know what to do, but ultimately can suffer from the decisions made by first-time bull runners.”
Dennis Clancey, Founder of Encierro
An unprepared person standing on the route isn’t just a risk to themselves. They are a variable in a system that is already operating at the edge of what it can absorb. The experienced runner who has spent years developing the instincts to stay safe still has to navigate around the standing body who didn’t plan. That burden falls on people who earned their place on the route by taking it seriously.
The Rule Is Simple: Participate Fully or Get a Balcony
The encierro doesn’t have a spectator zone on the street itself. There is no position from which you can be present without being part of the event. Once you step onto the cobblestones, you are in it, and the only question is whether you’re prepared to be in it.
If you’re not ready to run, genuinely run, with a position, a plan, forward momentum, and the awareness that comes from having thought through what happens if something goes wrong, then the right move is not to stand on the street. It’s to get off the route entirely.
Get a balcony. Watch from above. Take the encierro seriously enough to either prepare for it properly or step back from it entirely. Those are the two honest options. Halfway in, standing on the side, committed to nothing, is the position that produces the most casualties.
The runners who have been doing this for decades know this intuitively. Motion is not just faster than standing. Motion is safety in a way that stillness fundamentally cannot be.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it safe to watch the running of the bulls from the street?
No. There is no safe spectator position on the run route itself. The encierro is not a race with a viewing lane. Once you are on the street, you are part of the event, and standing still is not a neutral position. It is actively more dangerous than running, both because you lose all freedom of maneuver and because you become an obstacle for everyone around you. If you want to watch safely, watch from a balcony or from outside the barriers. The run route itself demands your participation and your readiness, or your absence.
What should I do on the encierro route if I’m not sure I should be running?
Get off the route before the rockets fire. Once the run begins, the decision is made. There is no safe way to remove yourself from the street in the seconds the bulls are running. If you have any doubt about your readiness, step outside the barriers, find a balcony, or watch the run from outside the fenced sections. The encierro respects preparation. It has no patience for indecision.
Dennis Clancey is the founder of Encierro and has run the Pamplona encierro every year the bulls have run since 2007. He is a member of La Única Peña, Pamplona’s original peña, and has personally instructed approximately 4,000 clients, more than anyone in the history of the run. Learn more at his bio page.