AFTER 17 years at Essendon and 249 games, can there be anything different about James Hird?

Well, there is; and it was evident when the Dons trained indoors at the State Netball Centre last week in preparation for their exciting two-point win over Melbourne.

Even football media don't normally get as close to AFL players as standing on the sidelines of a netball court.

Hird looks sleeker and fitter, stripped of some of the upper-body bulk he has carried in recent seasons and at earlier stages in his career, notably when he was recovering from a three-year battle with foot stress fractures from 1997-99. Indeed, looking at him now, you see the same body lines as on the 1995-96 or 2000-01 vintage Hird.

The body mass has not changed greatly — "I'm the same weight as I've been the last 10 years," Hird said this week, "maybe a bit lighter" — but the shape has.

The "new-old" Hird is the product of a full pre-season, with plenty of running, including the Freeman ramp at Black Rock, and plenty of game-time.

"I've cut the weights down to once or twice a week, and I think playing games, playing every week, the body tends to get fitness from all that football.

"Last year I wasn't able to train as much. I might have looked a bit heavier because I was doing more weights. The fact is, I didn't play eight or nine games, and had no pre-season games, so I was stuck in the gym a bit more.

The change in body shape, says Hird, "hasn't been a conscious effort. It's just a fact of playing the games and staying away from injuries."

Tonight will be Hird's 14th premiership game for 2007, his longest sequence of consecutive games since 2001. With the last six games of 2006 added in, he will have played the past 20 Essendon games in a row. With new elements added into his recovery — a Pilates session, less time on the training track between games — he is coming up better each week.

After a slow start, Hird has played his best football in the past two months. More by accident than design, he says, he has gone back into the middle of the ground. No more floating across half-back; no more avoiding the heat of the centre square.

Hird says it is a "no compromise" approach. "If you go out there thinking, 'I'm a bit older and I'll make some concessions, I won't run as hard or I won't run for that ball because I'm older', then you probably shouldn't be out there.

"You definitely shouldn't be out there," he adds emphatically.

One obvious thing to wonder is whether Hird's decision that this is his last season has had a positive impact, a mental release that has put him in a more relaxed frame of mind.

Certainly, he is not being loaded up with the sort of work that a player with five more seasons would be giving. He doesn't have to put more fitness in the bank; he can draw down on his account.

Hird doesn't think so. "It's more the fact that my body feels good, I've got a good team around me, a really good Pilates guy who gets my body in order early in the week. I feel good because my body feels freer than it has in a long time.

"You under-estimate when you're tight and sore how much it takes away from your game."

Fitness is acquired like a formula one driver gets his lap time down.

A clean entry into one corner means a faster exit and approach to the next, and so on around the circuit.

The opposite is also true. Pick the wrong line at one point and you are losing time all the way around the lap.

Hird is getting each corner pretty much just right at the moment. He is also benefited from some outside advice. With the blessing of both the club and high-performance manager John Quinn, he has been allowed to do his own thing in the past two pre-seasons. He has worked with Athletics Australia chief executive Danny Corcoran, who was football manager and fitness adviser at Essendon when Hird first started.

"The club was good enough to give me some time to do my own training," Hird said. "They gave me a program to do which I followed and I also called on Danny.

"I've been lucky enough to have two people who both know a lot about getting players fit looking after me. Danny has been more a mentor, someone who can look at it from a bit of a distance, but I'm still training with John's program."

Allied to that is Hird's management during the season. "We've got a good system. Quinny has got the amount of training I'm doing during the week spot-on. And I'm playing the right amount of game time."

During the pre-season, Hird was doing running sessions as good as he had done 10 years ago. He is seeing the benefit in games.

"I really feel I'm starting to run, where last year I wasn't. Whether it was my body or my mind, I just wasn't running the lines."

Hird has also been noticeably more willing to come to the bench this season. He was famously unreconciled to the concept a couple of seasons back, but credits assistant coach Gary O'Donnell with selling him on the benefits.

"I found it hard to come to terms with," Hird admits, "but once I embraced it, I found it really helpful."

He also pays more attention to detail. "As you get older you have to be so much more mindful of what you eat, how you train. When you're young, you can get away with more, but you have to be (more) diligent the older you get. Your metabolism slows down, you don't want to be carrying any extra weight."

Hird certainly is not; nor is he any burden on the team in his final year. has his form given him pause to reconsider, even fleetingly, his decision.

"No, this is it," Hird confirmed. "I'm very comfortable with the decision, it feels right. I'm sure once the day of my final game comes it will be emotional, but at the moment I feel very comfortable in saying, 'that's it', and just trying to get as much out of the rest of the season as I can.

"It feels right and I think I just go with that."