The summer fat is rolling off him now and muscle is becoming hard again and superb fitness is almost there but not quite yet. To put my expected ideal of superb fitness into perspective, I will say I expect all my dogs to run for five to six hours any day I take them out. Two ten minute runs in a field trial is so easy for them after having to cope with a real working day. Not all of my dogs are still in great shape after five hours of hard working but Mist is a top guy and is still going strong at the end of a long working day. He gets that from his Dam who can run all day long and still does at near eight years old, and after four litters and thirty five pups now and perhaps more to come! as she is looking so good again this season.

As the many little bitches Mist has to run against in our field trials these days, wiggle their rumps and run around their handlers feet, Mist is striding at twice their pace when over open ground and using his now well educated nose, to find what we are hunting after, game! I would be devastated if he ever missed some game. He never has on any working day and in all the field trials he has run in so far and I feel sure he never will, such is my faith in him and his work. That comes from him being a real working dog and not a 'trial only' dog to my way of thinking. He 'is' a real working guy in other words and has to earn his keep every season, as all my dogs have to do. Field trials come second with me and my dogs, as, if they cannot hold down a working job all through the season, and so produce flushed game all day long, then I would not trial them. Mist is nearly always the biggest Springer in the trials we have run in which is 'unfashionable', as mentioned, to a great extent these days I would say, but the more other handlers watch him run, the more they appreciate him I feel sure. 'Whatever' in a field trial, this dog is giving me so much pleasure now and all with just a few quiet words to him all day.