By David Sharp,Associated Press Writer

The weather at Maine’s Sugarloaf USA was frightful Wednesday: zero degrees, gale-force winds and bone-numbing wind chills. For Paul Schipper, it was simply delightful to stay in his warm home and not feel compelled to go skiing.

At 82, Schipper’s Cal Ripken-like streak of obsessively hitting the slopes every single day has ended after more than 24 years, or a total of 3,903 days.

It happened in January when Schipper, sickened by the flu, was simply too weak to put on his skis and carve his way down the slope. But there are no regrets. The retired airline pilot admits that it had become more work than play.

“I’m just as happy,” said Schipper, whose two-story house is near his beloved ski mountain in Carrabassett Valley. “It was getting to be a drag.”

Schipper’s exploits are the stuff of legend at Sugarloaf USA, where he skied through sickness, pain and injury, and through rain, sleet and blizzards. He started his skiing streak shortly after Ronald Reagan won the presidential election in 1980.

The cockamamie idea was hatched while he and some friends, all avid skiers, were relaxing in the ski lodge, recounting how many days they had hit the slopes. Schipper and others vowed to try to ski every day single day that season.

A year later, Schipper was the only one of them to achieve the goal, having skied all 174 days in the 1980-81 season.

“He sets a goal and he’s driven to meet it,” said his son, Jeff Schipper. “He’s like that no matter what – whether it’s fishing or skiing, or when he was flying.”

Once, Schipper vowed to catch 500 fish during the summer. He’d mark how many brook trout he caught each day on the calendar, his son said.

That determination served him well in his career. He completed training as a fighter pilot in the last days of World War II and flew into the jet age in F-86 Sabres. Later, he became a pilot for Eastern Airlines, based in New York.

Along the way, Schipper developed a passion for skiing that ran so deep he sometimes headed for Chile in the offseason to continue skiing.

He overcame obstacles that might’ve stopped others. He kept skiing after breaking his ribs, wrists and several vertebrae in 1969, when he jumped to safety when the landing gear collapsed on his airliner. He continued to ski after breaking his leg in 10 places after hitting a rock on a ski slope in upstate New York.

After retiring, Schipper moved to Maine and bought a ski lodge down the road from Sugarloaf.

And that’s where “the streak” was launched. Over the next two decades, Schipper went to extremes to keep the streak alive.

In 1987, he traveled to the top of the mountain in a ski-grooming machine at midnight so he could ski down before driving 71/2 hours to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., for his son’s graduation. He was back on the slopes the next day.

In 1993, he delayed the removal of a cancerous kidney to keep the streak alive; in 1995, he underwent bypass heart surgery during the offseason. Both times, he was back on the slopes when the snow began falling.

In 1997, a doctor created a special cast so he could keep skiing after a collision with a snowboarder broke his thumb.

As he entered the new millennium, Schipper’s eyesight had become the biggest obstacle. He suffers from macular degeneration and glaucoma, and his depth perception suffered despite prescription ski goggles that he wore.

Despite that, he talked about shooting for 4,000 days, which would’ve happened this April. But some privately worried about him.

“I got the feeling that he was a prisoner to it. A day like today, if the streak was still alive, he’d be obligated to go up there and ski,” said Adam Socol, a longtime family friend and skiing buddy from Fairfield, Conn.

It all came to an abrupt end in January. His wife, Chris, got the flu and then so did Paul and several houseguests. Schipper, who was sick for a week, circled Jan. 4 on his calendar. It was the end of an era.

These days, Schipper still skis but only when he wants to. “I ski like a human being now,” he joked. “I don’t have to go.”

Sugarloaf is planning a celebration in honor of Schipper, and Sugarloaf officials plan to submit paperwork to the Guinness World Records for longest-running skiing streak, said Bill Swain, spokesman for the resort.

Richard “Crusher” Wilkinson, vice president of operations at Sugarloaf, began working at Maine’s tallest ski mountain the same year Schipper started the streak. Over the years, the two became close friends.

“He’s worn out, physically,” Wilkinson said. “It’s time. He pushed it further than anyone else would’ve.”

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