Felice Herrig, who trains in Crystal Lake, ready for return to UFC action Saturday in Chicago

After years of climbing the ranks, winning professional kickboxing titles and fighting with various MMA promoters, the pace of Felice Herrig's breakthrough onto the big stage of the UFC ended up being unsustainable.

Since her first two UFC fights, Herrig hasn’t fought in more than a year – something she had done only once previously in her seven-year MMA career and something that will change this weekend.

On Saturday, Herrig, who trains out of the Team Curran MMA gym in Crystal Lake, will return to the octagon for the first time since April 2015.

Herrig is set to face Kailin Curran of Hawaii in a strawweight bout on the main card of Saturday’s “UFC Fight Night Chicago” at the United Center. The event, which features Holly Holm fighting Valentina Shevchenko, will be broadcast on Fox at 7 p.m.

“Right now, she’s in a great place,” her trainer Jeff Curran (unrelated to Kailin) said. “She’s just trying to keep her focus on fighting since she’s been off for a little over a year, and that last fight took it out of her. She went and made some changes to her lifestyle a little bit to bring herself healthy again. Not that she wasn’t healthy before, but all that weight cutting and all the fights and training takes its toll on you. So she just wanted to take some time to reboot mentally and physically, and this training camp has been great. She’s feeling good and in good spirits.”

An accomplished kickboxer turned MMA fighter in 2009, Herrig joined the UFC in 2014 for Season 20 of its reality show, “The Ultimate Fighter.” After reaching the show’s quarterfinals, Herrig won her first official UFC match and four months later accepted her next. That second fight ended up being her last for a while after Herrig lost to Paige VanZant (now the 10th-ranked fighter in the class) by unanimous decision. She left feeling burnt out.

After the pressure and build-up of her last fight – some “10- to 12-hour media days in New York City” – Herrig’s trainer said she didn’t want to do any media leading up to the Chicago fight.

In a behind-the-scenes training camp video posted on the UFC’s website, Herrig said, “I feel like my last fight I was really burnt out because I wanted to give so much. I was so burnt out that I had nothing left to give when it came fight time. It’s actually really hard for me to talk about because I’ve never felt like that before in a fight. So that’s why I took so much time off from fighting.

“I just got to the point where I’m like, ‘This is me and this is what you’re getting, so take it or leave it.’ None of that matters and here I am, just ready to fight.”

While she took the year off from competing, Herrig was training for a return all along.

“She never stopped training, just taking the pressure off of not having a fight was the main thing,” Jeff Curran said. “Training smart, training less intense, just kind of letting her body rebuild itself and things like that was big in part to bringing her back to where she needs to be.”

A few months ago, Jeff Curran said, they began looking for fights again.

“We always knew she was going to fight again it was just kind of a matter of when,” Jeff Curran said. “When she got back into the mindset of ‘She’s got a fight on the books; she’s got to pick it up,’ at that point it was kind of like been off long enough now she’s excited about picking it up and digging in and it was business as usual.”

It helps that Herrig’s return comes close to home for the Buffalo Grove native.

“I’m just excited to fight in my hometown,” Herrig said in the UFC video. “It’s where I started; it’s where I came from. It’s nice to be able to come back and share that with the people around me.”

There also will be “a good crowd from the gym coming,” Jeff Curran said. “Just overall being in Chicago she’ll have a lot of support.”

The 31-year-old Herrig comes into the fight with a 10-6 overall MMA record and a 1-1 mark in UFC bouts. Her opponent, Kailin Curran, is a 25-year-old Hawaiian with a 4-2 record overall and 1-2 record in UFC. While Herrig is coming off a loss, Kailin Curran enters the match on an upswing after picking up her first UFC win in December.

“I feel like Felice has an advantage pretty much everywhere with her opponent,” Jeff Curran said. “But that’s just by visualizing how the girl fought and she’s fought. One thing when you’re new to the sport and you’re getting new coaching and you’re climbing the ladder like someone like Kailin is, she’s always got something to learn, so she’s always going to come out better probably than the last time she fought. We kind of expect that.

“We’re not ... shaped too much in her brain about how the fight’s going to go, we’re just confident that she’s going to be stronger and we’re confident that she’s going to have the skill advantages in most departments. After that it’s just a fight and we have to see how things fall in place.”

For her part, Herrig said she’s not worried about the competition.

“I’m not really concerned about what Kailin is thinking,” Herrig said in the UFC video. “The goal is always the same: to win fights.”