BLAZING TRAILS
GREG DURSO HAS GOALS...FOR HIMSELF AND FOR THE KELLY BRUSH FOUNDATION.
G
reg Durso is a guy who likes to set goals. For his 37th birthday this past February, he’d planned to ski every trail at Mt. Ellen. (The weather intervened but, as he said, “That’s ok, “I’ll do it next year.”) Other goals he has ticked off in the last decade; finish a marathon, do an Ironman triathlon, ride the 30-plus miles of largely singletrack trails in the Stowe/Waterbury area in one day. One goal that he’s looking forward to and actively planning: climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. But perhaps the most life-changing goal he ever set was to bike 25 miles in his first Kelly Brush Ride, the annual bike ride out of Middlebury that benefits the Kelly Brush Foundation’s mission to help people with spinal cord injuries lead active lives. Durso has always been an athlete. Growing up on Long Island he played soccer, skied and wakeboarded. He had graduated and was working in banking in New York, when he headed up to Okemo for a New Year’s ski weekend with friends. After skiing, he and his buddies took sleds out on the slopes. On one run, Durso bailed off the sled and careened into a tree stump. He hit hard enough to sever his spinal cord. At 23, he was paralyzed from the chest down. That was 2009. “There was never that lifetime TV moment where I felt sorry for myself,” he says. “I was happy to be alive and I’m a go-getter, so my first question was: What’s next? I was actually eager to do physical therapy,” he says. His aunt forwarded him information on the Kelly Brush Foundation — started by Vermonter Kelly Brush who had crashed in 2006 while ski racing for Middlebury College and severed her spinal cord. “I got an entry-level handcycle and thought – ok, that’s my first goal, this 25-mile bike ride.” The ride became an annual event for Durso. The next year, he applied to KBF for a grant for a sitski. He got the ski – “the same one Kelly uses,” he notes— and returned to a sport he had always loved. “Before I got my own sitski, I was going to programs and using theirs, which is tough because you’re using different equipment and they have to
Greg Durso, left, lead the Kelly Brush Foundations’ first Mountain Bike Camp last fall at Kingdom Trails. Photo courtesy Greg Durso
fit you in. Having my own made a huge difference,” he says. While some of the Kelly Brush Foundation’s work is dedicated toward preventive measures – for instance, KBF has helped provide safety fencing at ski races, including the Women’s World Cup in Killington – the focus
is providing grants for adaptive equipment. Durso’s next goal was to do a marathon, which meant he needed a race chair: one wheel in the front, two in the back and powered by gloved hands pushing the handrim. He did the Boston Marathon in 2011 and then the
Long Island Marathon in 2014 in two and a half hours. “Then I thought: I biked 25 miles, I ran a marathon, why not do a triathlon?” Durso knew that to do so he would need a better bike. “Good adaptive bikes, like good regular bikes, are going to cost a lot more than what you buy at Dick’s Sporting
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