How my goals for cross season turned out

For some reason, I announced my cross season goals on my blog.  Perhaps this was an attempt at accountability.  I'm not sure that it worked, but here's how they worked out.

Achieved:
Continue having fun.  Especially true when I stopped caring so much about how I finished and rode more for myself.

Ride the muddy lines whenever it's smart.  There were plenty of muddy lines this year.  I have some clothes that may never recover.

Learn to settle into my own pace within the first two laps.  Important because, as counted over beers last night, I had the hole shot or was second onto the grass in 8 of 13 races this year.  2 had combined fields with 1/2/3's for the start, so they almost don't count.  I checked my lap times on my watch at Taneytown and Reston - I don't slow down, everyone else just speeds up.

Finish top 5 in a 3/4 MAC race.  I surprised myself by doing this on the last race of the season.  Perhaps the small field and technical course helped, but comments from a bunch of people came in later about how strong I looked, so I'll take it.

Incorporate some weekly core training and stretching.  I was a bit more hit or miss about this than I should be, but also included some hill interval running and a few long runs, so certainly better than last year.

On the fence:
Clean my own bike at least once.  Shea and I disagree whether I've fulfilled this.  In the freezing cold rain at Granogue, I spent at least 4 minutes at the bike wash removing the bulk of the mud.  But he's done the cleaning of all the minutia during the week between races.

Get rid of the double hop on my remount. This depends entirely on whether the remount occurs on the first lap or the last.

Keep my training hours as high as they are now for the latter half of the season.  I didn't keep a training log.  Therefore I don't know.  The weather was not conducive to late season road training.  If I had to guess, this belongs in the FAIL column.

'Failed':
Win.  Twice.  Then I won't have to waffle about when I'm ready to go up to the 1/2/3's. I didn't win.  After writing that I had a great race at DCCX and took 2nd.  But I'm not waffling about going up.  I got the upgrade.  Next year I'll just have to get faster.