I find it super fun to hear that people are having issues with their normal lives. I think listening to runners is one of my favorite things to do. They are always complaining about gear and how a certain pair of shoes ruined their whole week. Or a pair of socks is a game-changing event. I am not in any way dissing them but I do think that it is funny that they talk about gear so much and yet have so little. I am also a runner and do it with a stoma. That means yes, I have an ostomy bag and it comes along with me for all my short and long jogs outside. It means I have a whole new set up of gear that I need to take along with me and it also means that I talk about gear way to much too. The fact is that the more we talk about our gear rather it be regular runnign shoes, socks, or ostomy gear the better it usually gets. In 2020 information flows like the wind and bad news gets around 100000 times faster than it used to in the business world. If a company has any issues with gear the whole world knows in a matter of hours. That is why it is really great to have a stoma in 2020 and to enjoy jogging.
Information is what allowed me to get out of my fear of not being able to be active with a stoma. I mean I was afraid that most of my life was pretty much over when I got out of surgery. I thought my active lifestyle was going to end and that I would never jog on a trail again. Then I hopped on my phone in the hospital recovery and saw people were running and doing crazy things with stomas. I saw Iron Man competitors and quickly realized that if someone can swim a couple of miles in teh ocean then bike a hundred miles and also run a marathon in teh same day with a stoma that I could simply jog on the daily. It was a huge joy to see runners and people with stomas discussing gear and talking about how things worked and didn't work. It was that talk that gave me hope in my hospital bed and got me into feeling that life would be ok pretty quickly after surgery.
Now I didn't jump right into running right after getting a stoma. I took life a little slow for a few months because I wanted to learn how to do things and how to not make mistakes while outdoors and be embarrassed. But soon I got the courage to do a little more active work and all while being safe and following my doctor's instructions about getting my abs and body back into the right shape. I then found life to be pretty much the same as it was before, just I used a little extra gear for my stoma and had to prepare a little more for each run.
What I ended up really finding was that my shoes and the way I ran made a big difference. I ended up learning to barefoot run or to use minimalist shoes. This changed my life and kept me running like a pro!
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