Voices lost with move of Brad and Britt from mornings to afternoons

As I was getting ready for work on Monday, March 12, I was happy when Britt Whitmire mentioned that Ann Compton would be coming on the Brad and Britt Show at 7:50 that morning.

Compton, the ABC Radio White House correspondent, was one of my favorite regular guests on their morning show. I particularly liked that time slot because I could hear her during my drive to work. In previous weeks, her appearances had been earlier.

Little did I know when I walked away from my car that this would be the last morning I’d hear her on the show. It would also be the last time my favorite morning talk show would even be on in the morning.

Later that day, I heard the stunning news that Curtis Media was taking the show off of its morning-drive slot on WZTK in favor of afternoon-drive time on WPTF, TalkRadio 850 (also on WSJS in the Triad.) For years, AM850 was the only sports-talk radio station in the Triangle, 850 The Buzz.

I rarely agree with Neal Boortz, but his tweet  regarding this move (displayed above) was spot on.

As I blogged two months ago, Brad Krantz and Britt Whitmire made my morning runs a lot more entertaining, and saved me from the sometimes inane sports talk on 99.9FM (Mike and Mike) and 620AM (Mark and Mike).

It was somehow fitting that this was the week that we switched to Daylight Saving Time. I happily was able to go on my early-morning runs without needing a headlamp up until that time because the sun was rising earlier. But literally and figuratively, my early-morning runs began to plunge into the darkness.

The Morning Rush on Rush Radio or Bill LuMaye's show on AM850 are not even half-decent substitutes. I’ve never enjoyed talk radio shows such as those that have political agendas.

I'm happy for Brad Krantz, left, and Britt Whitmire that
they no longer have to get up at 3 in the morning, but
my early-morning runs won't be as entertaining.

The Brad and Britt Show is the rare show that features intelligent political talk without an agenda, and with good humor.  I’ve even resorted to the all-comedy station (Funny 570, yet another Curtis Media station) at times during morning runs.

Not only did Curtis Media take my favorite morning show and move it to the afternoon, but a lot of voices seem to have been left behind.

Compton and all of the other regular ABC Radio guests no longer appear on the show. No more Tuesdays with Sam Donaldson and no more of the excellent insights on the presidential campaign politics from Steven Portnoy, Alex Stone and others.

Apparently the move severed those ABC ties and the show instead gets CBS Radio reporters. It’s not all a bad thing since I’ve been able to hear veteran White House correspondent Mark Knoller, one of my favorite political reporters to follow on Twitter.

For the most part, though, it’s a sad case of lost voices.

Brad and Britt have spoken on the air about the transition to using CBS Radio reporters, but haven’t spoken about the most missed voices since they moved to afternoons: Britt’s impressions of Dan Rather, Rush Limbaugh, Strom Thurmond, George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, among others.

I’m wondering if management has told him to hold off on those impressions since I haven’t heard any of them since the move. Are you kidding me? If that’s the case, then that’s crazy.

“The Rather Report” was a hilarious daily staple of the show in the mornings and I haven’t heard it once since they’ve been moved to the afternoons. I’ve also heard none of “Lil’ Rush.” Nor have I heard any of Britt’s other excellent impressions.

It’s bad enough that the suits at Curtis Media took them away from my morning routine. But to take away some hilarious elements of the show is stupid.

Speaking of stupid, at last check, if you go to the Newsradio850 site and click on “listen live,” you instead get a stream of WSJS out of Winston-Salem. The Winston-Salem news and those Triad traffic reports aren’t too helpful for Triangle listeners.

If you want to hear the fourth hour of the show, you’re out of luck unless you can get AM850 on your radio. The “AM850 stream” instead gives you the WSJS news.

 (UPDATE: As of Monday, March 26, when you call up the stream of AM850, you actually do get the stream for AM850.)

They still do the show from Burlington, which is interesting considering that friends who live there say that the reception they get for the show isn’t very good. When they were on WZTK, there were no such issues.

At least management was smart enough to keep Brad and Britt on the air.

It’s my understanding that their news person during the morning show, John Brockwell (although I've heard him on the North Carolina News Network during the Brad and Britt Show), and the weather forecaster, Randy Jackson, lost those jobs as well as afternoon drive-time host Allan Handelmann and occasional fill-in news guy Pete Davis. That’s the radio business, which has had its cruel side for many more years before it became sadly routine in the newspaper business.

I’m happy for listeners who are discovering Brad and Britt for the first time and were introduced to the infamous 13th bagel story this week. I just wish the show had many of the elements that got lost in the move and that it still aired mornings!

Important rule of marathoning: Always respect The Wall

Courtesy of TitanXT.com, the above table shows how my times
compare to other runners in my age group. The third column shows the
fastest times for runners in my age group. 

Executive summary: Marathon No. 27 and Tobacco Road Marathon No. 3 wasn't my best, but given the virus I dealt with in February, a 3-hour, 48-minute, 8-second finish (18th out of 67 in my age group) wasn't bad. After coming in at 3:42:13 in the inaugural TRM in 2010, I had a frustrating 3:50:56 time in 2011 and was a little better than that today.

I had been looking forward to this race for a while. It was my first marathon since my little heart scare last spring. I was eager to put that episode behind me and show that the marathons can and will keep coming and that it still can be fun. Was I too old to still run a PR?

I always had heard that when you taper two weeks before the marathon, the lack of training won't hurt your marathon performance because your conditioning will only fall after two or three weeks. That adage seemed ominous when I came down with a virus four weeks before race day. I lost five running days and seemingly the only breathing exercise I got during that time was coughing. The timing wasn't very good, but certainly could have been worse.

There was more to worry about last week when the forecast suggested a humid race day with high temperatures in the 70s. Fortunately, that didn't pan out and it was pleasantly overcast, in the high-50s with even a bit of a cool breeze at times. It was a bit humid, but not that bad and I hydrated aggressively Saturday.

Without a firm race plan since I wasn't confident about my conditioning, I tried to shoot for mile splits between 8:15 and 8:30 with moderate success as you can see above.

At the 20-mile mark -- otherwise known as The Wall -- I had just consumed my second packet of Gu and chased it with a cup of Gatorade in addition to taking an Advil.

I was feeling pretty good at that point and wasn't happy with a couple of recent 9-minute miles. I suddenly channeled the referees in the UNC Asheville-Syracuse game and made the wrong call.

Since the race starts and finishes at the USA
Baseball Complex, my race number seemed
appropriate: Same as the number of regular-
season games MLB teams play.

Video review wouldn't help, either.

I decided that I felt so good that I should be able to race the last six miles. Why? I hate surrendering to survival mode at the end and sinking to the mentality of just worrying about finishing.

I figuring the best way to do that was to play the +/- game: It goes up 1 when I pass another runner and down 1 when a runner passes me. I passed 12 runners and put up an 8:25 21st mile, my fastest since an 8:21 in mile 13.

That didn't quite put me into the dreaded survival mode, but I simply used too much energy and it showed the rest of the way when I only had one sub-9-minute mile.

My +/- got up to 21 by the end of the race but mile 21 doomed me to some frustratingly slow miles at the end, where I got the largest of my 27 marathon medals. The second-largest was last year's TRM medal.

This medal is nearly 4 inches in diameter.

This really has become my home marathon and that's why I've run it all three years of its existence (although I lived in Virginia in 2010). It is so nice to sleep in your own bed the night before the marathon and to save the money and travel hassles of long drives, flights and hotel rooms.

The race had to deal with some adversity that led the start to be delayed 15 minutes last year. Many runners still missed the start because of issues with buses, and their drivers getting lost. A lot of races wouldn't be able to recover from that setback, but the TRM folks have come back strong.

Last year's issues obviously made runners paranoid. I again bought a parking pass so that I didn't have to take the bus. I arrived at the same time as last year, but instead of a parking place right next to the start, I ended up in bumper-to-bumper traffic for 30 minutes and had to park in an auxiliary lot. I parked an hour before the 7 a.m. race start.

The new course this year is more to my liking.

Just like the first two years, the race started and finished at the USA Baseball Complex and ran up to the American Tobacco Trail. Unlike the previous years, the 2012 course had an up-and-back on the ATT toward Durham County, then an up-and-back the other direction before backtracking the path from the start to the ATT.

There are some hills during that stretch between the trail and the baseball complex, but most of the last mile is downhill. There is a cruel little uphill stretch for the last 100 yards, but it's not too bad.

If you need huge crowds and big-city sights to keep you motivated, this isn't the race for you. There are small pockets of spectators scattered along the course, but it's flat and the course support is good.

Much of the trail is hard-packed dirt, which is much easier on your legs and knees than asphalt.

Where else can you go to a race and see a llama every year? There's a guy who obviously lives near the course who stands next to the trail with his llama cheering on the runners. The first year I saw it, I couldn't believe it and asked. Sure enough, it's a llama.

One runner was was dressed as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and I saw a couple of guys running without shoes on.

One request I've had many times: I don't know who came up with the idea that a spectator loudly ringing cowbells would make runners happy. But I'd like to have a discussion with them! The only thing that loud cowbells do for me is make me want to run faster so that I get away from them!

Other than that, I have no complaints about this marathon and plan to be back next year. And  maybe I can get through next February without coming down with a virus!