Yeah, you probably got faster and more fit as the season progressed.
It's totally possible to out-eat your training.
As much as I hate to say it, my weight is what kept me from reaching what I was capable of doing. I guess it's doubly-hard to lose weight in middle age as it is in your teens or twenties.
One thing that also bothered me was that my legs were really lean but my torso wasn't. I believe that I also carried more subcutaneous fat in my torso than legs. I wonder if this has something to do with the fact that cycling and where I focused my weightlifting was all lower-body. It is said that fat distribution is independent of the limbs you are using, but I wonder if that's not true. Basically, I wonder if I were training using activities that focused on core (swimming, jogging, tennis), if I would have lost the extra baggage I had in my core area.
Of course, it could be genetic. When I was the fittest ever in my teens and early 20s, I was never close to having a 6-pack. Strong but never lean.