Long and winding road to recovery

Done it again!  I pretty much wasted first quarter of the year for over training, so I had been very careful to stay away from that territory leading up to this marathon. I thought I was doing very well as I built up the distance and pace very carefully and stayed injury free. But, off course there is a BUT, it all changed on the last week of build up,just before going into taper. Up to that week, every thing was on track, and first time in the long while there was no niggle on my legs. So I decided to push for 100km total for the week as planed. Previous two weeks were 80k and 89K, so it was not a stretch to up the distance to 100K. Beside, I had about 3weeks of over 100k for last years Rotorua Marathon.
Problem this time was I also wanted to run in the marathon pace as much as possible to convince myself I could run at this pace for the full distance. I don't remember how the week ended up this way, but I did 31k and 25k marathon pace run almost back to back, just one easy day in between. After this, I started noticing a bit of pain on my knees at the begining of runs. At first these pain went away after warm up, so I didn't think too much of them, but decided to reduce the distance quicker than my planned taper just in case. Despite this, my knees got progressively worse and ended up not able to run at all in the last week before marathon. I also picked up a cold from my kids about a week before marathon and was having nasty coughing fit right up to the night before the race! Looking back, it is actually obvious what was the logical way to go. DNS. But runners who go for full marathon tend not be logical; we are forever hopeful kind of people. So I was hoping magically all the problem goes away by the morning and go under the target time!  I heard someone say" marathon is 20 mile of hope and 6 mile of truth. Well my hope did not last 20 miles in this race. It got shattered at around 15miles when my right leg started cramping up and lest of the race was just plain agony.
Well, it has been nearly 2weeks since the marathon, and I am still paying the price of the mistake. Even though my right knee does not hurt to bike or swim, it is still to unstable to run on,so I had not run for 10days now. nearly eternity in runners mind. To be honest, I am not even sure if my knee is getting better at all, still always hopeful every time I wake up in the morning to find somehow my knee is magically pain free. Well what did I say, We runners are forever hopeful kind of people.......