No need to ride long. More important to do climbing repeats, especially longer climbs. So a day of speed work, a day of climbing repeats, a recovery day, and a long moderate ride day. Maybe other shorter moderate rides as recovery allows. That's the usual thing. You should ride a century or double here and there to test your fitness and fueling plans. For long rides, I get most of my training from one 60-100 mile group ride per week, ridden at my limit. Then I distribute a day of formal intervals and recovery and moderate rides through the week as my recovery allows. However, I'm lucky at having a compatible group to ride with. Most folks have to do the more usual thing.
I like ramping up to about 200 miles/week in the last couple of months before the A ride. A lot of those miles are in zone 2, flat rides.
I once tried the Friel plan, except riding longer distances, and I overtrained in just a few weeks. Most important thing is getting used to riding fast. You can only do that by riding fast. You can't do that by riding long.
I know racers swear by formal intervals, but it seems to me that I've gotten better results by getting most of my interval training from riding hard over terrain and keeping track of my total time-in-zone by downloading from my Polar. Then I can tailor my efforts to my periodization plan.