An Ode to the Strip Mall Where I Used to Be

Or perhaps a dirge...

Lifelines Wellness Center, used to be located at Country Fair Shopping Center at the corner of Springfield and Mattis Avenue.

Country Fair Shopping Center, located in Southwest Champaign,
is just off I-74, I-72 and I-57.

Yes, *that* Country Fair. The one the Champaign City Council has been discussing lately. The one the News Gazette calls "the aging Country Fair Shopping Center", "the 50-year-old shopping center, which has numerous vacant storefronts". The one with potholes in the parking lot and stained ceiling tiles in the stores, which you can keep replacing but almost immediately get damaged again because of the many leaks in the roof. The one owned by GMS Management, based in Cleveland Ohio. Them. (Interesting story about a mall they owned in Cuyahoga Falls).

My Cabana at the Country Fair Location

While we were in between permanent locations, this was my massage room. We used to have a separate storefront at Country Fair for the gym and massage therapy. That office shut down, but the downtown facility was still under remodeling. So we "bunked in" with the sister Lifelines Recreation Center, joining Ants in Their Pants, kids' birthday parties, gymnastics and tae kwon do lessons, boxing, and rock wall climbing.

At the Recreation Center, there wasn't a separate room available for me to set up my table in. It's a pretty open floor plan. So we built a fabric walled structure. Visual privacy is quite good in the cabana, as we call it, and it's a fun effect to look up at the tapestries and the tented roof. Unfortunately, you can't restrict noise from the activities outside of the cabana, and it's hard to keep it heated as toasty as I'll have the downtown facility.

While at this location, I dissuaded clientele looking for pure relaxation massages. A positive side effect of that was that I specialized in working with pain conditions. I became even more efficient at achieving change in muscle tissue texture than I was before. I was also able to work much more closely with Laura Kalman, the medical exercise specialist who owns Lifelines, on more tightly coupling the massage I do with the medical exercise services she offers. While both are powerful on their own merits, we found that done together there is a multiplicative effect on the progress that can be achieved.