I ride for health and fitness too, I don’t race. I am very competitive with myself though. I have learned that without an A event to prep for I can skip the Specialty phase. So, I run a cycle of SSB I → SSB II → Sustained Power Build → SSB I → etc. So far I’ve found that this gives me good FTP improvement and I can hold high levels of FTP for long periods of time. I have enough fitness to never get dropped from my group rides, but not enough snap to win any city limit sign sprints. Last week I thought I was late to my group ride, but I was actually early. I was “chasing” the group for the whole ride but I never caught them (because they were behind me). I looked on Strava later and I held a pace 3 mp/h faster over 2.5 hours as a solo rider than the pack I was trying to track down!
Here is my past 18 months of training with FTP. I have marked on the chart the FTP result that appears at the beginning of the training block as the end of the completed one. So, rather that “this is level of my fitness to mark the zones going forward” they are “this is the FTP I arrived at after completing the previous training block”.