How are you measuring output? By speed or power? If you're riding in a lot of wind, your power numbers (or real effort) will be higher to sustain a given speed. Thus your 4-5% increase in speed may have been more like a 15% increase in effort.

Higher output efforts are always good, if you have them planned and know what you want out of it. You won't increase speed or power by training at the levels you are alraedy at; you need to push beyond current thresholds to make new ones.

Higher effort unfortunely does not equal a better ride. Much of your pacing would depend on what type of race you're targetting.

For example, targetting an IM race - you'd be doing almost all of your long rides in some variation of Zone 2. Like xc800 noted, you're targetting different rides for different purposes. That then helps you to move away from worrying about pace - because pace is irrelevent. Just keep it in zone, and everything will work out. To put it in perspective, my average long ride training pace last year was 14-16mph, but my average HR was smack in the middle of Z2. My average IM pace was 20MPH, and my half was 23MPH. Why the differences? Terrain. I trained in the mountains, but raced on the relative flats. Pace does not equal effort. HR and/or watts (a derivite of that) would equal effort.

Lastly, all my long rides had a simple 25 minute run after them. 10 mins Z2, 5 Z3, 5 Z4A, 5 cool down. That's it. Note that my paces for those were pitiful, but that's all right - it was all about getting the legs used to it. That's the longest I ran off any of my long rides. I certainly did shorter bricks, but no long runs attached to my long rides.