Four Peaks, No Fluff

The first time Mia Rucoba ran “Four Peaks, No Fluff,” it was late April, rainy and muddy, and she had almost no experience running Marquette’s technical trails. She had met Greg Borzick and other runners through the Wednesday morning Muffin Runners group when someone suggested she join them on Friday.

“They do this every Friday?” Rucoba remembers thinking. “Because it’s a hard route. We kind of normalize it, but every Friday we run 10 miles and hit all four of the peaks. At first, I was just like, ‘that’s crazy.’” She had mostly been a pavement runner, and suddenly she was picking her way over terrain that demanded so much attention she remembers being unable to look up for nearly the entire two hours. The runners gathering on Fridays were there to get a workout, and Rucoba quickly understood that keeping up was part of the deal.

A few years later, that first outing looks different in hindsight. Rucoba has become an accomplished ultrarunner, with finishes at the Superior Fall 100, Marquette Trail 50, and other long-distance trail races that have given her plenty of experience on difficult terrain. Yet the same roughly 10-mile route that once demanded every bit of her attention is now familiar enough that she sometimes heads out alone with little more than a handheld bottle. “It used to be intimidating, like, ‘Oh, gotta gear up for Four Peaks,’” she said. “But now it’s like, I’ll just grab a handheld and go run it.”

Origins

There is no “Four Peaks, No Fluff” race, no registration date, and no official start line. In fact, there is no longer a single definitive route. The original version began at the Sugarloaf parking lot, but trails, shortcuts, additions, and starting points have shifted as runners have adapted it over the years. Several versions now appear on Strava, while the Friday group Borzick leads currently starts near Wetmore. What remains remarkably consistent is the basic proposition: roughly 10 miles, four high points and about 1,900-2,000’ of climbing.

The route lies a few miles north of Marquette, Michigan, on the Lake Superior side of the Upper Peninsula, where rocky high ground rises from thick forest close enough to town that runners can disappear into surprisingly rugged country within minutes. It links four locally familiar high points—Hogback, Top of the World, Bareback, and Sugarloaf—through trails, rocks, roots, short road sections, and repeated climbing. Sugarloaf Mountain, the best-known of the four, sits about six miles north of downtown Marquette along County Road 550. Among the runners who know the route, the full name is usually shortened simply to “Four Peaks.”

Hogback and Sugarloaf are familiar destinations even to many non-runners in the area. Top of the World and Bareback are less obvious to newcomers, part of a web of trails and locally known high points that can be remarkably difficult to piece together if no one shows you where to go. “Four Peaks” began in a much simpler way: runners showing other runners the way.

Tom Asmus traces the idea to around 2009, when he and neighbor Jon Mommaerts were experienced runners with young children and limited time. They had spent years running in the Harlow Lake and Sugarloaf area, knowing its trails and climbs in pieces rather than as a single outing. “We didn’t have a whole lot of time,” Asmus said. “So it’s like, well, if we’re going to go for a run, let’s go big. You know, this is like our one day a week to really do a good run. So let’s make it count.” The next weekend, they went out to string the four peaks together.

The Four Peaks, No Fluff founders: left-to-right Jon Mommaerts, Greg Borzick, Tom Asmus, Joe Jameson.

PHOTO CREDIT GREG BORZICK

Joe Jameson and Borzick joined the small circle almost immediately, helping shape how the run was done and introducing it to others. The four came to be known among local runners as the “founding fathers” of Four Peaks.

The guiding idea for Asmus and Mommaerts was to connect the high points they already knew while cutting out mileage that did not contribute to the effort. “The idea was to pack as much vertical in the minimal amount of horizontal distance,” Asmus said. The route took its name from that philosophy: “Four Peaks, No Fluff.” The variability rarely asks a runner to do the same thing for very long, and it refuses to add easy mileage to the route for the sake of miles—hence “no fluff.” There is enough runnable trail to settle into a rhythm before another climb interrupts it, followed by a descent, a reorientation, and eventually another peak.

Rucoba calls the route “compartmentalized perfectly.” She describes approximately two miles of easier running followed by a climb, then another transition before the terrain begins offering something different again. “It goes by so fast,” she said.

Runner’s High (and lows)

Scott Drum has spent considerably more time thinking about why that works. A former professor in Northern Michigan University’s School of Health and Human Performance, Drum is an exercise and sports scientist and a longtime trail runner. Before moving to Marquette in 2012, he’d spent twelve years in Colorado immersed in a mountain-running culture that included elite athletes. His frame of reference for climbing did not begin in the Midwest, which made his first encounters with “Four Peaks” all the more surprising.

At times he found himself speed-hiking, scrambling, and using his hands and feet on steeper terrain—“four points of contact,” as Rucoba puts it. It reminded him, he said, of “the Rocky Mountains ... in a little microcosm of a place.” Before long, he had reached a conclusion that still sounds almost improbable for a runner with so much Western mountain experience: “All of a sudden, I was like, this ‘Four Peaks’ loop is one of the best 10-milers in the nation, in the world. You can pit it against anywhere.”

Four Peaks, No Fluff has lasted without a board, a race committee, or anyone formally charged with protecting its traditions, beyond receiving the coveted sticker.

PHOTO CREDIT TOM ASMUS

A western mountain outing might climb continuously for several thousand feet. “Four Peaks” repeatedly changes the demand instead. “You know that it’s short, steep, shortish,” Drum said. “But then you know you got some descent to rest a little bit, to kind of change up the muscle groups and the pace.” The terrain also requires far more than cardiovascular fitness; rocks, roots, and uneven descents recruit balance, agility, strength, reaction time, and footwork in ways a smoother surface cannot. Yet Drum’s favorite explanation may be less technical: “The route distracts you from working hard because it’s so beautiful and different.”

Low sections put runners back into the woods before another ascent lifts them above the canopy. From the high points, Lake Superior appears again and again, vast enough that its horizon can look more like an ocean than an inland lake.

Weather changes the experience as much as effort does. Drum has done “Four Peaks” in summer drought and on snowshoes in winter, through heat, rain, mist, and slippery conditions. “You get to choose the flavor each time you do it,” he said. “And even during it, the flavor presents itself.”

Rucoba understands his comparison with mountain running better than most. She has run in Colorado and lived there for a year. Out west, she said, running often felt more destination-oriented: choose a mountain pass, run toward the Continental Divide, and reach a spectacular place. “Four Peaks” has a different character, much of it spent immersed in deep woods before suddenly opening onto another climb or view. She loved running in Colorado, but Fridays still made her think about Marquette. “Every Friday at 9 a.m. ... I’m just like, ‘Oh, Friday, 9 a.m. I’m missing it,’” she said. “Like I’d truly get so sad.”

Drum discovered much the same thing after leaving Marquette for Flagstaff, Arizona. He had western mountains again, including 12,000’ Humphreys Peak nearby, yet “Four Peaks” stayed with him. “It just lives in your head,” he said. He and his wife had not thought of themselves as particularly attached to Lake Superior until they moved away from it. Flagstaff had mountains and forest, but it did not have that enormous body of fresh water waiting beyond the trees. “We miss it—we miss it a lot,” Drum said. “We miss the lake and the water more than we thought. We miss the people.”

Community & Tradition

The people are as much a part of “Four Peaks” as its topography, and the route’s scale may help explain why the tradition has endured. Drum calls it “that sweet spot of distance and time,” long enough to feel substantial and short enough to fit into a morning. Borzick has become the keeper of the Friday tradition, sending what he calls the “bat signal” and gathering whoever happens to show up. Some weeks that means a sizable group; other times it might be one other runner. But the meeting time remains 9 a.m. “I’m the guy that’s going to be there to run it,” Borzick said. “And if you want to run with me, go ahead. If you want to run ahead of me, go ahead. But we’re going to meet at 9 o’clock on a Friday.”

As he has gotten older and dealt with injuries, Borzick said he feels himself “transitioning away from ‘Four Peaks’ as my training run to ‘Four Peaks’ as a tradition run.” The pace matters less now than making sure someone is still there to keep the Friday run going. The group has always operated with a certain amount of self-sufficiency, something Borzick calls the old “pirate’s code.” Runners were expected to understand their own abilities and arrive prepared. There was no official sweep, aid station, or course marshal, and a hard group workout was not expected to reorganize itself around someone who had badly underestimated what was ahead.

Rucoba learned the route the same way. During her first summer, she got lost regularly, particularly around Hogback, and sometimes the other runners deliberately put her in front. “The only way you’re going to learn it is lead it,” she remembers being told. Wrong turns taught her trails that were not even part of ‘Four Peaks,’ until eventually the maze stopped feeling like a maze.

One of the original expectations attached to earning a coveted “Four Peaks, No Fluff” sticker was that a person would complete the route with someone who knew it. The route crossed multiple trails without signs telling anyone where to turn and knowing where to go was part of completing it. Strava has changed that. A sufficiently determined runner can now study heat maps, find other people’s activities, or load a GPS track onto a watch and make a reasonable attempt at following one of the route’s variations alone.

Rucoba acknowledges that the information is there for anyone willing to find it, but that still is not how “Four Peaks” entered her life. Someone invited her. Someone showed her the turns. When she kept getting them wrong, the group put her out front until she learned them. Now she takes other people.

Rucoba has brought friends onto “Four Peaks” herself, including one who wanted to hike it rather than run. Slowing down let her see details she normally passes at running speed and changed her perspective on a route she thought she knew completely.

The Friday run changes with the season. Summer can be faster, with runners dividing naturally by pace and training goals. Fall is more relaxed. Leaves cover rocks and roots, racing seasons are winding down, and nobody is particularly interested in rolling an ankle for the sake of a Friday split. The group slows down, takes in the colors, and spends more time together. “We all want to run together,” Rucoba said. Afterward, they often swim, making “Four Peaks” the centerpiece of an entire morning rather than something that ends when a watch is stopped.

Drum remembers that simplicity as much as the terrain. People meet, run, finish, exchange a high five and go on with the rest of their day. His exercise-science mind can dissect the climbing, balance, and variable exertion, but his memories often take him somewhere less technical. He described finishing with the sense that the morning had somehow given him what he needed: “My day now is complete.”

“Four Peaks, No Fluff” has lasted without a board, a race committee, or anyone formally charged with protecting its traditions (beyond receiving the coveted sticker). Asmus and Mommaerts worked out the route and gave the idea its first shape. Jameson and Borzick were there nearly from the beginning, helping establish the culture around it and carry it outward. Borzick kept calling people out on Fridays as lives and schedules changed. Those runners brought more runners, who learned the turns and eventually became the people doing the showing.

The route has evolved, with variations adding Sugar Cube and other summits. The original four have proved modular enough that runners have doubled and tripled the challenge into Eight Peaks and 12 Peaks, while Strava has supplied segments, fastest known times, and an orange line to follow where memory once had to suffice. Even the founding fathers have never agreed on every detail. Borzick recalls a long-running dispute over whether the route properly ends atop Sugarloaf or back at the parking lot. Asmus and Mommaerts argued for the summit; Borzick and Jameson preferred the parking lot. Borzick said they once convened a “Founding Fathers ‘Four Peaks’ meeting” over the matter. The question was never resolved.

Today, Rucoba can head into those woods with little apprehension about where she is going, but she still carries a small reminder of the route’s older way of measuring completion: her “Four Peaks, No Fluff” sticker is on her water bottle. When people notice it and ask her what it means, she tells them her friend Greg hands out the stickers to people who complete the route. “It’s just this thing,” she tells them.

Borzick has resisted making the stickers available over the counter, saying that even now they should come from one of the founding fathers rather than simply be picked up at the local running store. Asmus still sounds a little amazed at what that inexpensive piece of vinyl accomplished, years later. “Did you ever just take a moment and consider the importance of having a catchy phrase and also a tangible item to institutionalize this event?” he said. “All wrapped up in one sticker.”