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FFC Oak Park member Gary shares his experience with fitness and wellness, becoming a stroke survivor and how it altered his course of life. In the fall of 2007 I was 56 years old, tired, overweight and my back hurt….
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Countless movies, books, and fairy tales feature magic mirrors of one kind or another. Some are portals to another world. Others have a spirit living in them, or can show the past, or reveal events far off but important to…
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When I first joined FFC as a new Chicagoan in 2004, my kids were two and four. I remember watching people do Pilates through the studio window and thinking, they look so graceful and… healthy. Not to mention lean and…
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I didn’t grow up in a crunchy-granola, windbreaker-wearing, athletic family. Like many children of the Midwest, I was raised in a rural community full of good, old-fashioned folks with good old-fashioned mentalities. Was I fat? Hell no! I was “big-boned,”…
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When FFC asked me to write a blog for the website my first reaction was, “It’s me, Pete. You got the wrong guy!” When they asked again, I said, “When did you get a liquor license… because you must be…
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My name is John Jaramillo, and I finished the 2018 Chicago Marathon. In other words, I did something that I once deemed impossible to ever accomplish. Let me give you some context around the lack of believability in that endeavor:…
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I’ve been overweight all my life, since I was a little kid in kindergarten. I was always getting picked on and seen as an outcast – all the way to high school. I always kept telling myself that things would…
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I joined FFC in December last year as an early Christmas present to myself. After a successful year of racing, I was ready to head into the “off-season”. Even though I had a successful and enjoyable season, I was looking…
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For more than 10 years, the idea of trekking in Europe had been on my mind – it only needed a focus to actually come to life. I soon found it: a 100-mile trek around the largest massif in Europe…
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Last summer I, a thirty-something British woman, relocated from London to Chicago. I have an extensive background in marathon and ultra-marathon running, but by the time I arrived in Chicago, at the end of June 2017, my fitness was at…
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