Penn State Intercom......July
26, 2001
Spanier
runs with
bulls in Pamplona, Spain 
During this past academic year, President Graham B. Spanier spent a lot of time studying trends in higher education, navigating through various issues and running through countless interviews with the media on all sorts of topics.
Instead of relaxing this summer, however, he studied the roads of Pamplona, Spain, and navigated his way carefully through them as he went running with the bulls -- a tradition in the town during the Festival of San Fermines, made famous by Ernest Hemingway through his books The Sun Also Rises and Death in the Afternoon.
Spanier was accompanying his wife, Sandra, a prominent Hemingway scholar, on a trip she was leading for the Penn State Alumni Association.
"I had been studying the nuances of the run for some time and decided to do it for the cultural experience," Spanier said. "After carefully planning my strategy to avoid being trampled or gored, and after walking the course, examining the twists and turns, the bulls' tendencies, and deciding where I needed to be in relation to the timing of the bulls, I did it. In full sprint at the end of the course, I arrived at the bull-fight ring just as the first bulls arrived, managing to steer (no pun intended) clear of charging bulls. It was a rush, literally and figuratively."
Spanier also spent four days this summer whitewater rafting on the New River in West Virginia, and a bicycle ride across Wisconsin is on his agenda before the summer ends.