Beating Clocks And Competition ; Skiing On Skis Since Age 2, Veteran Racer Joe Hershey Of Mount Joy Still ‘Blows Everyone Around Here Away’

JON RUTTER

LNP CORRESPONDENT

On winter weekends Mount Joy insurance salesman Joe Hershey chucks shirt and tie for skis and a speed suit.

He clicks into his bindings and flies down the mountain with multiple clocks ticking.

There's the race clock, naturally.

There's Father Time. (Hershey turned 50 last year.)

And in the background looms what ski journalist Nathaniel Vinton calls one of the sport's "existential challenges," snow cover threatened by a warming climate.

Now, though, Hershey is winning National Standard Race (NASTAR) competitions like crazy.

"He blows everyone around here away," says Roly Shover, owner of Outfitters Ski Shop in Rohrerstown, where Hershey sometimes tunes skis.

"Joe is a very good racer," observes Rohrerstown dentist Steven Rheault, who is himself defending a NASTAR national championship this year in the 60-64 age group.

Hershey "is going to try to go to a national level," adds Rheault, a former ski jumper from Lake Placid, New York. "Skiing is so small around here it's nice to be competitive. It makes it more fun ..."

Last year, Hershey aced the Eastern Pennsylvania Ski Council men's giant slalom at Bear Creek Mountain Resort, Berks County.

He was second in the 2014 EPSC slalom, though he hadn't before encountered the hinged plastic poles that racers must bash out of the way with padded shins and forearms.

He was used to bamboo sticks, which skiers maneuvered around. (Once, in eighth grade, Hershey took out a couple of the markers and won the race with them draped across his body.)

This season for the first time, he'll face American Ski Racing Alliance competitors from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware.

(Belatedly. The first four races were blotted out by El Nino warmth and rain.)

Hershey says ASRA events draw a bigger regional pool of racers and include courses set for slalom, giant slalom and, occasionally, the higher-speed super-G.

Area NASTAR runs are typically giant slaloms.

The sheer amount of time Hershey has spent skiing over the years helps him excel across disciplines.

Young Joe began tottering around on skis at age 2. When his parents, who owned the former Snow Shed Ski & Sport Shop in Lancaster, resettled 10 minutes from Mount Sunapee, New Hampshire, in the early 1970s, he was ecstatic.

"I would ski the entire day myself," recalls Hershey, the youngest of four children. If he wasn't in the classroom he was on the mountain.

He grew up idolizing U.S. Olympian brothers Phil and Steve Mahre, and Sweden's Ingemar Stenmark.

He entered his first race at 6. He was dressed as a candy bar at the time.

The grade school getup didn't faze him, says Hershey's wife, Ann. Like skiing legend Bode Miller in nearby Franconia, "he got bit by the bug.

"Those wild New Hampshire men," adds Ann Hershey with a laugh. Her husband started racing for the varsity team at 12. The kids in Sunapee's tiny junior/senior high school also ski jumped and competed in Nordic events, often finishing exhausted and retching - but victorious.

Hershey continued to speed down mountains as a college student at Plymouth State University. He raced several years for the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Association, the seeding body for potential World Cup athletes.

Among those poling madly from the start during Hershey's USSA debut was five-time national champion Felix McGrath. Hershey reports fighting back-of-the-pack ruts to move up from 168th place to 40th by the second race that day.

His northern idyll ended in the mid-1980s when he returned here to work in the family insurance business. But skiing karma did not end.

Explains Ann: "The key to a successful marriage is to meet your (future) husband on a chairlift." That happened 26 years ago at Camelback.

The Hersheys, who recently opened Definitive Insurance Solutions in Mount Joy, honeymooned on skis out West. They also had two daughters, Meghan and Samantha, now seniors, respectively, at Franklin & Marshall College and Lancaster Country Day School.

"Meghan is the mirror of her dad," adds avid skier Ann. "She's got the same style, angulation, carving. ... When you watch Joe ski he looks like liquid coming down a mountain. We're so proud of him."

Besides Lancaster Ski Club, Hershey's long been active in NASTAR, the nationwide pace setting and handicapping program that lets recreational racers test themselves against U.S. alpha skier Ted Ligety.

At the local NASTAR course on Roundtop Mountain Resort, York County, Hershey is rarely out of the top-level platinum awards.

His daughters are also NASTAR medalists.

It's great, democratic fun, says Hershey, who's eyeing the nationals in Colorado this year: "If you can turn both directions on skis you can ski NASTAR."

To stay in shape, Hershey says, "This summer I started road biking again and lost almost 20 pounds."

Fall sees him sweating through high-intensity "Insanity" workouts three days a week and lifting weights two days.

He files his ski edges so sharp he can nick a fingernail across the metal and leave a small white puff of shavings.

The Hershey ski trip bucket list runs to "the raw and the rugged," the homey and the natural, says Ann, who glowingly describes a 1990s tree-and-powder vacation in British Columbia.

Racing teaches you how to handle that big, wild terrain with better balance and poise, her husband adds. It's the discipline of the gates.

"You have to turn where you have to turn."