Greg Durso

By Phyl Newbeck

Age: 41
Home: Burlington
Profession: Senior Program Ambassador, Kelly Brush Foundation
Primary Sports: Mountain Biking and Skiing

Greg Durso’s life changed in 2009. The 23-year-old New Yorker had taken a trip to Okemo with friends. After a day on skis, the group grabbed some plastic sleds and returned to the slopes. On one of those runs, Greg went off the trail and hit a tree, shattering his spinal cord and leaving him a paraplegic. Determined not to let the injury keep him from the things he loved, Greg set out to find a way to return to an active, outdoors life.

A graduate of Penn State, Greg, had just started a career in banking. Before the accident, he played soccer, skied, and wakeboarded from his Long Island home. Not wanting his disability to define him, Greg has returned to sports with a vengeance, cycling, skiing, and even doing two Ironman triathlons. With a goal of making more sports accessible to others with disabilities, Greg has worked to help create accessible mountain bike trails and since 2019, he has been the senior program director for the Kelly Brush Foundation in Burlington, which inspires and empowers people with spinal cord injuries to lead active and engaged lives.

Greg didn’t waste much time getting back to athletic activity. He was injured on January 1, 2009, but after getting his first handcycle at the NYC Abilities Expo, his goal was to go to Middlebury, ride 20 miles, and meet Kelly Brush and her family during the annual Kelly Brush Ride in September. It was his first post-surgery goal, but most definitely not his last. “The irony,” Greg said, “is that I didn’t know the bike as well as I thought.” Two weeks before the event, in what he describes as a “very happy development,” Greg learned that his nine-speed bike actually had 27 speeds, without which he might not have been able to negotiate the hills. 

Soon, Greg began to have other goals. By 2010 he was back on the slopes and in 2011, he got a grant for his own monoski. In 2012, he talked to a friend who was planning on running the Boston Marathon to raise money for spinal cord injury research. “I got FOMO,” he said, so six weeks before the race he got a racing chair and taught himself how to use it. It was the first of the 10 marathons he has raced. On the bus to the starting line with other wheelchair users, Greg met someone who was about to do a triathlon. He had already been taking swimming classes and so now he had yet another goal.

After Greg’s first triathlon in New York City, he realized he needed a better handcycle if he was going to upgrade to the Ironman distance and applied for another grant. In 2015 he did both the Ironman Lake Placid and Maryland races. As a T-4 paraplegic, Greg has to rely solely on his arms and chest for ambulation. “Swimming is a challenge,” he said “because you can’t kick so your stroke is very different. You’re so happy to get out of the water after two hours but you have to maintain your speed on the handcycle for 112 miles with just your biceps. Everything takes longer.” Greg noted that the running section should be the easiest because of the racing chair but since he’s been using his arms for the other two segments, it’s still difficult and he needs to brake on some of the downhills to keep from running people over. Despite all the difficulties, he described the races as “really fun.”

For the first 11 years after his accident, Greg continued to live in New York, working a commercial banking job. He was often on the road to Vermont and seven years ago, he was able to make the move to Burlington. Greg had been doing the Kelly Brush Ride in Vermont every year and also took part in the Boston and San Francisco versions of that event. There was one eight-month period when he ran into Kelly and her husband on a monthly basis. “I was always around or adjacent to her,” he said, so after all the going back and forth, he asked if could work for the foundation. Being hired by the Kelly Brush Foundation allowed him to leave New York and his commuting days behind.

When Greg was injured, adaptive mountain biking didn’t really exist but by the time he moved to Vermont, people were starting to be aware of the possibilities. Greg had grown tired of cycling on the road and being close to the ground with traffic whizzing by. In 2017, he tried adaptive mountain biking with Vermont Adaptive Ski & Sports. He soon realized that not all trails were suitable and decided to see what he could do to improve that situation. 

Greg notes that there are four requirements for a good adaptive bike trail. The first is that it needs to be wide enough for a three-wheeled bike which is 30-38 inches across. The second is to make sure that the trail isn’t so off-camber that a rider can get thrown over. While an able-bodied person can move their torso from side to side, that isn’t possible for adaptive riders. The third requirement is a lack of obstacles like trees or oversized rocks. An able-bodied rider can get off their bike to get around them but that isn’t an option for adaptive users. Obstacles can also include impediments to getting to the trailhead. Lastly, many mountain bike trails have bridges and those also need to be wide enough to accommodate a three-wheeled bike. 

Greg said a number of machine-built trails can be used by adaptive cyclists including those at Cady Hill in Stowe, Little River in Waterbury, and parts of Saxon Hill in Essex. He began working with the Vermont Mountain Bike Association and Vermont Adaptive Ski & Sports to see what he could do to create a broader network. Soon, he was going to trails to meet with trail stewards so he could physically assess the trails and report on how they could be improved. The stewards would come back with a budget and then submit a grant request to the Kelly Brush Foundation so the trails could be made more adaptive-friendly. 

All in all, Greg has assessed over 200 miles of trails across the state including 50 miles of the Kingdom Trails. Many networks now have fully accessible trails with adaptive signage, something Greg believes does not exist in any other state. 

Adaptive-friendly is good, but Greg and his able-bodied friend Berne Broudy of Richmond went one better. They learned about land that had become available in Bolton and made plans for a fully adaptive trail network. Greg became one of the lead consultants and in 2024, the adaptive-optimized Driving Range opened. “You’d never know that it was built for adaptive riders,” he said. “It works for everyone.”  

Over 200 volunteers contributed 5,000 hours of work over the course of three years to make the Driving Range a reality. “I always say that sometimes the mountain biking itself is the easy part,” said Greg. “You need to be able to access the trail, know which trails to take, and even if there is an accessible bathroom. It’s so important to create these spaces for us to have. We’re building from the start so all of us can do this all the time.” 

The beauty of the Driving Range is that Greg no longer has to set up a ride a week in advance because he might need assistance. With the Bolton course, he can have a group text with his friends, and they can be on their bikes in two hours. The process of creating the Driving Range has been chronicled in the movie, Best Day Ever, which premiered in October 2025 and is making the rounds at film festivals. The film shows adaptive and able-bodied cyclists riding together. “We sometimes think that we’re a burden,” Greg said, “but this shows that we can go someplace and be fully accepted.” What had initially been conceived as a short film became a 48-minute feature. Greg was adamant that the movie shouldn’t be “inspiration porn” but instead would show the full vibrancy of the cycling community. 

Best Day Ever has won awards at film festivals in Chile, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the US. It won the awards for Best Mountain Sports Film and Audience Choice at the 2025 Banff Film Festival, and Greg said it was the first to receive a standing ovation there. Greg frequently gets correspondence from people who have seen the film, telling him that it changed their lives. A recent letter writer from England said the film showed him that his future would not be a consolation prize. 

These days, Greg teaches adaptive skiing and mountain biking, helping people get a good start with the right equipment. He describes the job as involving a lot of problem solving so that when the student is ready to ride or ski, they have everything they need. He is proud of the work he has done with the US Open of Mountain Biking in Killington. They always had an adaptive division, but the athletes were pretty much racing with the kids. Greg thought it was important to show that adaptive cyclists didn’t need to have the trails dumbed down for them and for the last two years there has been open adaptive division in the pro race group, something which Greg said doesn’t happen anyplace else. 

Greg is effusive in his praise for the Kelly Brush Foundation. “They showed me that there was a great community of athletes,” he said. “All the positive changes I have are because of the foundation and I think everyone should have the same options, so it has come full circle.” In his position, Greg has created mountain bike camps and events across Vermont. KBF has given away seven million dollars in equipment grants. “It’s amazing what we’ve been able to do,” he said. “The foundation changed my life and now I can do it for everyone else. There is no better feeling.”

You can usually find Phyl Newbeck outdoors, cycling, swimming and kayaking, and skiing and skating in winter. She moved to Jericho in 1995 and although still a flatlander, she stacks a mean woodpile. Phyl (vtphyl72@gmail.com) has written for regional newspapers and magazines and is the author of Virginia Hasn’t Always Been for Lovers: Interracial Marriage Bans and the Case of Richard and Mildred Loving.