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.