Greg Durso, Blazing Trails

from Vermont Sports 22-3 March April Issue

Martha Steele, Recovering

BLAZING TRAILS

GREG DURSO HAS GOALS...FOR HIMSELF AND FOR THE KELLY BRUSH FOUNDATION.

Greg 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

Goods,” he says. He applied to the Kelly Brush Foundation again and got a grant for one. He completed an Ironman in in 2014 in three hours, 45 minutes.

Durso had been attending many of the Foundation’s events and speaking on their behalf, as well as attending adaptive events around the country. “Everywhere I went, there were Kelly and Zeke,” he said, referring to Kelly Brush Davisson and her husband Zeke Davisson.

Durso was becoming more and more engaged with the adaptive community. “I loved doing what I was doing and finally I asked Zeke, are you looking to hire someone?” In 2019, Durso joined the organization and now serves as the program director.

Last year, the Kelly Brush Foundation also brought on Edie Perkins to lead the organization, taking over from Zeke Davisson, who had been running it for six years. Perkins, 50, not only brought many years of experience in education, marketing and nonprofits, she is a top athlete who finished 25th in the Boston Marathon in 2005 and ran a sub-3-hour marathon in New York. In 2017, she was struck by a car while riding her bike. Since her spinal cord injury, she’s joined a paracycling team, finished second in the criterium in the Nationals and has completed two more marathons.

Both Perkins and Durso have helped build on the momentum Brush and Davisson started. In 2021, the foundation had its biggest year ever, giving out more than 261 grants totaling $861,000. “This year, we hope to hit $1 million,” says Durso.

One of the areas Durso has been helping to grow is mountain biking. He has worked closely with Vermont Adaptive and other organizations to help make Vermont’s mountain bike trail networks more accessible. “I love riding places such as Bolton Valley and the Hinesburg Town Forest because of the downhill, and enduro-style of riding” says Durso. “What’s harder when you are on a three-wheel bike are side hills. And then you have to think about bridges and trail widths.”

This past summer, Durso, Vermont Adaptive and other organizations worked with trail networks from Kingdom Trails to Slate Valley in Poultney to make their trails more accessible to people on all types of wheels.

Last October, Durso led the Kelly Brush Foundation’s first Mountain Bike Camp. Held over four days at Burke Mountain Resort, it drew riders from as far as Alaska and Oregon as well as the New England states. “It was amazing,” says Durso. “We had friends come help from Vermont Adaptive, Stowe Mountain Bike Academy, Green Mountain Adaptive, Kingdom Trails and even a friend of mine from the National Ability Center in Utah came out.”

Kelly Brush Davisson was there as well, rounding out the total to 11. “While doing the sports and all the activities we did was really fun; we are a minority 99 percent of the time,” says Durso. “To get like-minded people together who all have spinal cord injuries and to be the majority? That doesn’t happen very often. That starts to transcend the active lifestyle we’re trying to promote and that’s where the bigger things start to happen. To form all these relationships and to have people go back home and use the skills they learned here and grow from this? That was something big,” he says. Then adds, “It was the best four days of my life.”

And Durso plans to repeat the camp next year. —L.L.

“We are a minority 99 percent of the time. To get like-minded people together who all have spinal cord injuries to be the majority? That doesn’t happen very often. That starts to transcend the active lifestyle and that’s where bigger things start to