An unscheduled rest day

My legs are sore from Sunday's 16Km Long Slow Distance run. The run was as excellent as running for 1 hour and 45 minutes can be. It was as much a mental workout as a physical one. I'm sure these long runs will get easier and I'm crossing my fingers that the recovery starts getting quicker. I ran a 6K on the treadmill last night, but the legs tensed up much like the shin pain from several weeks ago. I've been stretching like a mofo but it seems to do only so much good. The fact that I'm sitting here typing with my back hunched and my legs crossed is probably not helping one bit. Tomorrow is massage day as well as a 7K day. I'm still deciding whether I should run early in the morning before the massage or several hours afterwards.

This weekend we are going to see BIL and family, whose house is in the same town as the cottage. It will be the first time in over 7 years that I have been to the cottage in the winter and only the 3rd time in my life that I've gone in winter. When I was about 9 years old my Mom and her boyfriend and I all got cross country skis for Christmas. We went up to the cottage to do a little skiing. It was nice, one of those 'just the 3 of us' times that were few and far between. It's not that my family didn't spend quality time together but my family likes to go big or go home so when there's a function, there is a chance that 10 people will be there. The rest of the time, I spent a lot of one on one time with either my (single) Mom or Grandma (who lived with us). We didn't ski again together again after that. Mom and R went a couple of times to the cottage and Mom and I went a couple of times but for the most part it was one of those hobbies you try to take up that requires you to buy at least 4 pricey new pieces of equipment, make all sorts of promises to yourself that you will keep it up, set up a new storage area in your home and then sell it all 10 years later while asking yourself why you didn't do it more often.