A Chicago man who was gored by a bull three years ago while running with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, was gored again on Saturday — but he still plans to run again on Monday. 
 
 Bill Hillmann, an author who has been participating in the annual tradition for 12 years, tells PEOPLE the 1,200-lbs. bull named Sentido jabbed one of its horn into his buttocks and then tossed him up a few feet. However, he says he managed to land on the ground with a relatively soft thud. 
 
 “I looked back again, and he was just on me,” Hillmann said in a phone call from Pamplona. “At the last second, he shot me straight up in the air. The horns just went in in a really weird way, and he gored me.” 
 
 Hillmann, 35, explains he immediately went into shock, which blunted the pain. 
 
 “I felt the blow send me in the air, but I didn’t feel piercing pain,” he says. “I walked to the medics.” 
 
 Stan Olszewski/SOSKIphoto 
 
 At first, he says, he didn’t even know he had been gored because his pants were intact after the animal had somehow pulled down his pants and rammed its horn through his yellow underwear into a lower part of his backside. 
 
 “The medics pulled my pants down and there was blood everywhere,” he recalls, adding he avoided serious injury because the horn came near his anus and testicles but missed them. 
 
 Hillmann was taken to the hospital where doctors evaluated his wound. “When he put his finger in there to check it, it felt like his finger went in two to three inches in my body,” he says. 
 
 Stan Olszewski/SOSKIphoto 
 
 Hillmann spent 36 hours in the hospital, where doctors stitched up the surface of the deep wound and inserted a small tube which continues to drain the blood. He is able to walk and sit. 
 
 The author was released Sunday and is now feeling some pain. However, he said he’ll be back running with the bulls on Monday. 
 
 “I’m really in love with the bulls and I’m really in love with the culture, so it’s almost an impossibility I would stop,” he explains. “I’m a daredevil at heart. It’s just who I am.” 
 
 Hillmann was more seriously injured during the event in 2014 when a bull gored him twice in the thigh, through one side of his leg and then the other. That time he spent 11 days in the hospital and needed a cane to help him walk for two months, he told The Atlantic. 
 
 Stan Olszewski/SOSKIphoto 
 
 Hillmann said his initial inspiration to run with the bulls was sparked after he read vivid depictions of bullfighting and bull running in Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises. 
 
 He said he travels annually to Pamplona for the San Fermin festival, the famed stampede when bulls run through the narrow streets alongside runners in white outfits with red scarves tied around their necks or waists. 
 
 This year, Hillmann is being filmed by a crew working on an interactive documentary called ¡Fiesta Pamplona! with Hillman as the main character in the “foreign runner” section of the story, producer Jennifer Gonzalez tells PEOPLE from Pamplona. 
 
 “His part of the story is integral in informing viewers the part that foreigners play,” said Gonzalez. 
 
 Hillmann says he is happy to be able to live his dream. 
 
 “I’m here to run, not sit in a hospital,” he says. “I have to get back out there. It’s what I love.” ||||| A reveller falls in front of Jose Escolar fighting bulls during the second running of the bulls at the San Fermin Festival, in Pamplona, northern Spain, Saturday, July 8, 2017. Revellers from around the... (Associated Press) 
 
 A reveller falls in front of Jose Escolar fighting bulls during the second running of the bulls at the San Fermin Festival, in Pamplona, northern Spain, Saturday, July 8, 2017. Revellers from around the world flock to Pamplona every year to take part in the eight days of the running of the bulls. (AP... (Associated Press) 
 
 BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — One of the two Americans gored Saturday during this year's second running of the bulls in the Spanish city of Pamplona is swearing that he will run again before the festival is over. 
 
 Bill Hillmann, a 35-year-old writer who also was gored three years ago at the San Fermin festival, was in stable condition. The bull that led the pack thrust its horn into Hillmann's buttocks before flipping him onto the street. 
 
 "In a split second he was on me. I tried to jump, but he hit me in the butt," the Chicago resident told The Associated Press by telephone from a hospital in Pamplona. 
 
 "I flew up in the air and landed on my back. I didn't know I was gored at first," he said. "Then people started telling me I was gored and pulled me over to the medics. I pulled down my pants and there was blood." 
 
 Despite his run-in, Hillmann says his love for the chaotic and treacherous spectacle of Pamplona's rampaging bulls hasn't wavered. 
 
 "I am probably going to run tomorrow or the next day, sure at this festival," he said. "I am already walking. The first time, I wasn't walking for a week." 
 
 Hillmann's wound was less severe than those of a 22-year-old American who also was gored on Saturday. Identified by the regional government of Navarra only with the initials J.C., he was in serious condition after his left arm was impaled and he was dragged for several meters (yards) before the bull flung him off and stormed over him. WBBM Chicago identified him as Jack Capra, of California, who told the station it had been his first running with bulls. 
 
 Three other Americans, two Frenchmen and three Spaniards — all men — needed hospital treatment for injures received during Saturday's frantic and crowded run of thrill-seekers. Two Americans and a Spaniard also were gored on Friday. 
 
 Hillmann was in Pamplona for a 12th consecutive year to brave the bulls and ran on Friday. 
 
 He was gored in the early stages of the run, when the bulls from the ranch of Jose Escolar confirmed their reputation as being unpredictable. 
 
 The bulls completed the 930-yard (850-meter) cobbled-street course in just over four minutes — well over the average of three minutes — because one bull broke away from the rest and turned around. 
 
 The other five plowed into the slower-moving crowds, knocking many runners down as they maneuvered through the narrow streets and wooden barricades. 
 
 Hillmann described this second goring as "just a tick" compared to his first one in 2014, which produced two thigh wounds he called "traumatic." 
 
 Hillmann, like scores of foreigners, discovered the San Fermin festival thanks to Nobel Literature laureate Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novel "The Sun Also Rises." 
 
 "It changed my life. It made me want to be a writer, to run the bulls, to come to Spain," he said. "When I got here everything in the book was still here, but a thousand times more. And it just keeps getting more interesting. People think this is just crazy people running. There is real art. If you pay attention, you can see it." 
 
 Hillmann claims to have participated in over 300 bull runs across Spain at traditional summer festivals. He has written a guide on bull running, along with a novel, and was back in Pamplona to make a documentary featuring him as a bull runner. 
 
 "The thing is that when you run, you always have doubts because you are taking a decision that can end your life," he said. "There is a shadow that follows you. Sometimes I don't run because I don't feel right. I usually get premonitions. Not today. I felt good today, but it didn't go my way." ||||| A Chicago author who wrote a chapter of the book “How to Survive the Bulls of Pamplona” was gored Wednesday during the Spanish bull running festival. 
 
 “When I fell, the bull fell with me and gored me in one motion,” said Bill Hillmann, who spoke by phone from his hospital room in Spain. “The horn went in one side of my thigh and exited the other side and he pulled it through.”Hillmann said he plans to run again next year.A former Chicago boxing champion, Hillmann is a veteran of the running of the bulls. His chapter in the 2014 e-book about the event offers frank advice to would-be bull runners that ranges from shoe selection to which parts of the course are appropriate for beginners."You cannot run a very long distance with the bulls,” Hillmann wrote. “They have four legs. They’re faster than you.”Hillmann, 32, said he approached a massive black bull Wednesday that had become distanced from the pack.“I always run with lone bulls when the bulls get separated,” he said after undergoing surgery in a Pamplona hospital. “I always try to run them up the street. This was a normal morning for me.”But he recalls being pushed and then tripping. Hillmann said he and the bull fell simultaneously. Though he said doctors expect him to make a full recovery, they told him the prognosis could have been much worse.“They said it was a centimeter away from my femoral artery and if it had hit that artery I would have died,” said Hillmann, who grew up in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood and today lives in Little Village.Though he apparently hadn’t been seriously injured before, this wasn’t Hillmann’s first time on the wrong side of a bull’s horns. In 2011, he told the Tribune about another close call in Pamplona.“One time I tried to challenge a bull, cut in front of him,” he said then. “He picked me up — I thought I was gored, but he just hooked my shirt — and he slammed me to the street.”The animal that gored him Wednesday was the heaviest of the morning's six bulls, weighing around 1,300 pounds. Hillmann said there were no hard feelings between him and the beast.“I don’t hold a grudge,” he said. “That animal, it was a beautiful bull. And if I wouldn’t have been pushed and tripped up and fallen down with him, I would have a great run with that bull.”A Spanish man was also gored Wednesday in the "encierro," when runners in red scarves and white outfits dash through the Spanish town's streets pursued by the huge animals.Wednesday's run was the third in the weeklong San Fermin festival, depicted in Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novel "The Sun Also Rises." A Hemingway enthusiast, Hillmann told the Tribune three years ago that the book led him to the running of the bulls.Hillmann, a bull running veteran of about 10 years, credited the event with helping him become sober and finish his Chicago-based novel “The Old Neighborhood.” He spoke at this year’s Printers Row Lit Fest.Hillmann said Wednesday’s wound — which he estimated to be between the size of a golf ball and baseball — hasn’t affected his passion for the event.“I love the Spanish fighting bulls,” he said. “It’s the most wonderful animal in the world and I’m proud to have been gored by one. It’s an honor and it only makes me love this tradition even more.”Reuters and Tribune reporter Meredith Rodriguez contributed.
– An American gored two times already while running with the bulls in Spain is willing to risk a third time, People reports. Author Bill Hillmann was living his Ernest Hemingway fantasy in northern Spain on Saturday when a bull gored his buttocks and tossed him in the air. The Chicago man hit the ground, looked back, "and he was just on me,” Hillmann tells People. "At the last second, he shot me straight up in the air. The horns just went in in a really weird way." As the 1,200-pound beast named Sentido stormed away along the narrow streets of Pamplona, Hillmann says he didn't feel "piercing pain" and managed to pick himself up and walk to find help. He didn't realize he'd been gored until "the medics pulled my pants down and there was blood everywhere." Hillmann, 35, spent 36 hours in the hospital but vowed to run with the bulls again on Monday. "I’m a daredevil at heart. It’s just who I am," he says. The last time Hillmann, who has run with the bulls at the annual San Fermin festival for 12 years, caught the wrong end of a horn was in 2014. That goring badly tore up a leg. "The first time, I wasn't walking for a week," he tells the AP. There have been five gorings and other minor injuries since the festival began on Friday. One victim, a 22-year-old California man, had his left arm impaled and was dragged for several yards, per the AP. (Hillmann is also the author of a book on how to survive the running of the bulls.)