The author of one of the most influential economic books, Wealth and Poverty, was medevaced off the summit of Mount Greylock Sunday after a trip and fall, while competing in a half-marathon on the highest peak in Massachusetts.
“I was entering the fifth mile of the half-marathon plus race up and around Greylock mountain. I had completed the run up the trails from Greylock Glen ending with the Thunderbolt to the summit,” wrote George Gilder in a Facebook post.
“I tripped on something and went flying. I have fallen fairly often in trail races and always just jumped back up and kept running. But I knew this was entirely different. My head hit a sharp rock and kind of opened up, with terrifying amounts of blood but no concussion,” wrote the Harvard-trained economist, whose groundbreaking book synthesized libertarian and social conservative streams of thought into the lesson that the key to success was the triad of Work, Faith and Family. Upon his inauguration, President Ronald Reagan delivered copies of Wealth and Poverty to all 2,000 of his administration’s political appointees.
Gilder’s most recent book, The Scandal of Money, is a defense of the gold standard and makes the case against the government monopoly on currency.
The economist was joking with two other runners, Mary Reeve and Jill Lizzotte, just before the fall, he said. He had just passed them and now they were passing him on a narrow and rocky trail. After he fell, the women, who turned out to be nurses, immediately administered first aid with another man.
The Adams Firemen lugged me to an ambulance which took me to the summit where I was helicoptered to Albany Med trauma center. There a resident named Laura Whistler put the puzzle of my head with three flaps of skin back together, and sewed in nine or ten inches of stitches in an hour and a half in front of daughters Louisa and Nannina. I felt incomparably blessed.”
Gilder said the race was his fourth 13.2 plus race, since he won the Codger Division in a Nov. 29 Seattle half-marathon for his 76th birthday.