Greg Durso talks community and that *feeling* when you crack a cold one after a day putting in sweat equity.

Author's note: Parallel Lines is a series about adaptive athletes focused on gear, opportunities and access. Throughout the series, I’ll be using both the phrases "para athlete" and "adaptive athlete," largely based on how the rider refers to themselves, though there IS a difference between the two.

It’s a bit of a square-rectangle situation: all adaptive athletes are para athletes, but not all para athletes are adaptive athletes. For example, someone with cerebral palsy may use the same gear as an able-bodied rider, even as their neurological disorder might prevent them from pedaling all day or from tackling high-exertion terrain on a summer day due to their body’s heat intolerance.

As a prefix, “para," means "beside / alongside of / beyond,"  which is exactly how each of the riders featured in this series exist: beside, along with, and often beyond their able-bodied counterparts, as this series will show.

When he was just twenty three years old, Greg Durso shattered his spinal cord sledding at Okemo Mountain over New Year’s. ”I fell off the trail and hit a small stump and it left me a T4 paraplegic. I’m paralyzed from the chest down,” Durso explains. “I have no abs.”

The mental and emotional after effects of the experience certainly took time and effort to move through, but Durso was determined to find joy again. “I just love having fun; it sounds so cliché, but I’ve always thought having fun is fun,” Durso laughs. “I like to go outside. I like to enjoy life. So after I was injured, I was like, how does that happen again?

Durso started Googling for answers. “And I found this organization called the Kelly Brush Foundation (KBF) in Burlington, Vermont,” he says. “Kelly was injured like two years before I was, in a ski racing accident, and she started a fundraising bike ride where proceeds would help people get adaptive sports equipment.”

Durso wasted no time connecting: he went to an abilities expo, met Kelly, got his first adaptive bike, and immediately signed on to ride twenty road miles with her for the abovementioned fundraiser. A skier before his accident, Durso was particularly keen to find a way back on snow. “So I applied for a grant and got a mono ski.”

Suddenly, Durso found himself traveling around the world to ski with friends again - and even though everything from flying to staying in hotels pushed him outside of his comfort zone, Durso says it was incredible to be reconnected with the life he’d loved before his accident. In that way, Durso asserts, “a piece of equipment actually transcends the sport. It creates a lifestyle and community for you.”

That community began to push Durso to try new things, including marathons, triathlons and Ironmans. “I had FOMO. I didn't want to be left out.” And then he tried mountain biking for the first time.

“At that time, about seven years ago now, adaptive mountain biking was just becoming a thing,” Durso recalls, “and Vermont Adaptive was one of the first organizations on the East Coast to start getting bikes.” So he started making regular trips from his home in New York to ride in Vermont - and rekindled his relationship with the KBF in the process.

“Anytime I had a chance to help them out, I was happy to do it,” Durso explains. After months of riding, chatting, and, eventually, scheming, Durso says he and the KBF had a joint epiphany: “We pitched each other a job.“ Once the details were ironed out, Durso quit his banking career and moved to Burlington to join the KBF as Program Director.

Durso has now become the person in charge of giving out the very grants that he received all those years ago when he was newly paralyzed. ” I understand full well all the opportunities I’ve gotten because of them. Everyone should be able to have that. These bikes cost $15,000 to $23,000 dollars, which is crazy; it’s a huge barrier to entry.”

But for Durso, equipment grants are just the first step. “I also started creating community-driven programming, because once you get your bike, what do you do? Where do you recreate? How do you do it? Who do you do it with?”

Durso says he, for example, had to figure out answers to those questions for himself, through what he calls a baptism by fire. “I made some friends that used to be downhill racers and we’d go to different networks and ask: ‘Is this trail Greg-able?’ We just figured out what was going to work and what wasn’t going to work for me.”

The process wasn’t always smooth, and Durso soon found himself wondering about trail design. Why was his bike doing one thing, while his able-bodied friends’ bikes were doing another? What would it take for a trail to feel better for him?

One thing led to another and before too long, Durso found himself helping the Vermont Mountain Bike Association (VMBA) and Vermont Adaptive assess trails to provide more accessible information. “You just don’t know,” explains Durso. “You don’t know where to ride, if the trail will be wide enough, if the bridges will be there, if there’s an obstacle that able-bodied folks walk around that you won’t be able to.”

Durso says that by adding an adaptive-friendly label to a trailhead sign or route on an app like Trailforks can help encourage more folks to ride. “It’s the low-hanging fruit. We can start doing this with the trails that we already have, to provide information that gets people comfortable to go out and not have to worry.”

Today, Durso says that about one hundred and ten miles of trail in Vermont - or almost ten percent of all trails - have now been assessed, which he views as a great start. But the bigger goal, in his eyes? To get more networks to build or update trails following universal design principles, which outline how to keep trail width, surface structure, and running slope truly adaptive-inclusive.

“We’re not trying to dumb the trails down,” Durso insists. “People will use the word adaptive and everyone goes straight to paved, flat, no climbing.” Durso shakes his head. “And it’s like - no! We want the trail to be rowdy, loose, rocky, chunky. We just need the off-camber to just not be so off-camber that we roll over, stuff like that,” he laughs.

Modern adaptive bike technology has a lot to do with just how rowdy a trail can get while still remaining adaptive-friendly. “I’m able to go ride terrain I never thought I’d be able to,” Durso says. The variety in types of adaptive bikes, too, has helped even the playing field and shorten the learning curve for folks with differing levels of ability or function.

Personally, Durso says he’s found himself drawn to two bikes in particular - much like an able-bodied rider might have a trail bike plus a downhill bike. “Different things for different adventures,” he says. “It’s just that it costs us $20,000 per bike to do that,” he adds ruefully.

Durso’s first bike is a ReActive Adaptations Hammerhead , a three-wheeled bike with two wheels up front and the drive wheel in the rear. “It’s one of those prone-style position bikes where it looks like you’re kneeling in it,” he explains. “And it’s what I prefer because I like to be in that more aggressive position over the bars. It feels like a two-wheeled rider would on their bike if they're actually in the ready position.”

His second bike is a Bowhead , a rig that Durso says has completely changed his perspective about where an adaptive mountain bike can go. With a twenty inch wheelbase and an articulating front end, Durso says the Bowhead can handle both tighter trails and tighter corners, while its suspension and three-thousand watt motor allow it to excel in steep terrain both up and down hill.

Like any good gear nerd, Durso has asked as many questions about his rigs as he has about the trails on which he rides them, which means he’s customized much of the set up on both. “I couldn’t make crazy big changes, because you can’t structurally change the geometry of the bike,” he explains. “But I figured out what I could maximize for different shock sizes, travel and wheel height.”

Durso says he’s discovered as he tweaks that while even the littlest things can make the biggest difference, figuring that out can be challenging. “Like tires: 20-inch, 24-inch, 26-inch… those are weird sizes that can be hard to come by. Who’s making them? And who’s making 26-inch carbon rims?”

“These bikes are so expensive that they’re kinda a once in a lifetime purchase,” Durso says, explaining why finding answers on how to make upgrades and perform quality maintenance are so important, especially as a rider’s skill level improves. “So, again, that’s why community-driven programming is so good.” When adaptive riders get together, Durso explains, they can learn from and problem-solve together.

And while he is grateful for the work companies like ReActive Adaptations and Bowhead have already put in to making gear as good as it is already, especially given how difficult the finances of research, development and production are, Durso is never not thinking about how to improve things - both for himself and for other adaptive athletes. In chatting with Durso, the phrase he uses most is “What would that look like?”

“I wish I could have one bike that does a little bit of everything,” he does admit to that end.”I feel like my Hammerhead has better suspension - it feels plusher - so maybe you’re moving faster in the Bowhead, but it feels clunkier, because it has a way smaller shock on the front. But then, on the Hammerhead, you get into a tight corner, and the bike is just wide and flat, so you end up hitting the brakes, whereas with the Bowhead, if you hit your throttle, you’re just gonna explode out of there. So there are things on all the bikes I wish I could fuse together.”

For now, Durso is largely content to use his bikes in tandem to seek the adventures that fulfill him - which, most recently, was a trail building project. “I got to lead consult on the whole build of a network called The Driving Range,” Durso says. “And it’s been really, really awesome.”

The entire system was built following universal design principles, “but you would never know that we specifically built it for an adaptive rider,” Durso says. “We wanted to create hard things, just making sure they’re not sketchy. I’ve gained so much respect for the builders, because that takes skill and technique.” Having two different bikes, with much different geometries and strong suits, helped Durso and his team ensure the system truly met the standard they were trying to set.

"A big part of what we did with the Driving Range is to get the trail builder in the different bikes with me to ride his own trails, so he can understand why I see the nuances I do." says Durso. "Each bike is different, so feeling what that's like on a trail helps you understand why I'm asking for this, or to do something differently so you can showcase that."

Durso says that he also loved being part of the process for more personal reasons. “It was just fun to feel like I could go to a trail night and dig because usually it’s like, ‘You’re in a wheelchair. What are you gonna do, dig a hole?’ So to be out there with them, and to have that opportunity to put my blood and tears into it, to get bit by one million bugs every Wednesday for three years, to have that beer at the end…” Durso trails off with the sort of smile that anyone who’s ever invested sweat equity into a project knows well.

“I love the trails there,” Durso continues about The Driving Range project. “But it’s more about the vibe, this vibe of being normal, of asking, ‘How do we create more inclusive outdoor recreation and normalize that, especially within the mountain bike community?’ It’s great that I can go ride those trails, but it’s mostly great that it’s a place that feels good to be at. The mountain bike community has been the best community I’ve been a part of so far in this journey of having a spinal cord injury, and I think more people should get to know how good that community can be for adaptive riders.”

To keep tabs on the development of The Driving Range, and an upcoming 2025 film about the project, as well as to watch Greg Durso bring a team of five adaptive riders to the US Open at Killington this September to race the standard downhill course, you can follow him on Instagram.