I know, it sounds a bit like "anything goes" or not really a plan at all - but that's not so.
Lets look at the earlier example of a rigid plan - the Saturday long rides were 70km then 80km then 90km - so that's 240km in total over a 3 week period.
There are other workouts in this rigid plan so its not possible, and I'm not going to suggest, spreading this 240km out over the whole 3 weeks.
And the "Long Ride" is a cornerstone of a sportive plan - you need to have serious continuous kms in your legs.
A flexible plan would take this 240km target and then see how to fit it into your life. Lets say one Saturday you have an unavoidable family commitment. That Saturday you can only imagine doing 40km. But the other 2 Saturdays are free - so you plan in 2 x 100km rides.
You achieve you 240km target.
That's how you do the equivalent to the rigid plan.
Or rather its not - because the rigid plan wouldn't take into account the short Saturday and you would end up realising too late that you were going to miss an important workout.
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Lets look a bit more at how this Flexible Training works next.
Italian events and European climbs