5K workout with a 10K warm up

I've mentioned before that for the last week I've felt pretty great.  Today was no exception.

It started with a good night sleep with a relatively early bedtime shortly after 9pm.  I woke up just slightly before my 3:27 alarm at 3:20am, wide awake and ready to go.  A couple sips of coffee and #2 was working for me.  5 lbs lighter I headed out the door to meet up with my group.

The temp was a decent 59 degrees but the air was thick with humidity.  Not optimal conditions but not bad either and didn't seem to impact performance.

We took out the first mile a bit slow at 7:39, and eased into the pace with the 2nd mile at 7:09.  Down to 7:02 for the 3rd mile and 6:58 for the 4th.  I felt good so far and was running loose and relaxed and letting my running partner set the pace for the most part (he'd slow down 3/4 up the hills and I'd wind up passing him a bit to maintain pace).

Hitting mile 5 I must have picked up the effort a bit because it split in 7:03 pace despite the elevation gain.  I tried to maintain that effort through mile 6 and hit it in 6:48.  10K and I was still feeling really good and was ready to start pushing.  Up another long hill for mile 7 I continued the effort and split it in 6:56.

Tuesday I turned around at the top of the hill and wound up averaging 7:01 for the 8.34 mile run.  Today, I figured I'd run an extra mile and give myself more time to go under 7...  Cresting the hill towards the 7 mile point I clapped my hands.  It was go time!!!

Mile 7 to the turn around point... I lost a bit of momentum at the 180 but quickly recovered.  One last small uphill and then a large downhill.  I was cruising now and hit the 8th mile in 6:33.  One more mile to go I found the next gear and pushed it.  By 8.75 I was hurting and could feel it in my stomach.  I rode the pace line, not quite dipping into the true pain zone.  Hit mile 9 at 6:23!  Felt good to finally dip under 6:30.  Let up a bit after 9 and finished up the final .35 at 6:28 pace.

• I ended up with a new Strava 5K PR of 20:28 which was only 3 seconds off the 20:25 I ran at Old Settlers Day last year (as well as some additional top efforts).  
• After the run I still feel pretty good and wound up going for a walk when I got back home and doing 36 pullups and 50 push ups.  
• This wasn't my fastest run of the year but it was definitely close to a top performance.
• The 6:23 was a nice confidence booster too... seemed like I could get down to 6:30 at the end of a run but would never see anything under.
• Strange but suddenly my HR is going higher then before without a bunch of pain.  For a while there I was doing fine in the 150-low 160's range but anything that got my HR much over 160 really hurt and also even when I did push it was like my HR didn't want to go higher.  Today I was up to the 170s by the end and I felt fine.  Hills have been much easier too and seem to correlate to the HR.  
• I was worried I was peaking/overtraining/plateauing but after today I feel like I'm reaching a new level of fitness.