The throngs of cheering spectators at Mortlake seemed a long way away yesterday. It was icy cold, gloomy, sleeting down and Oxford’s leading rowers were ploughing one of the bleaker stretches of the Thames in an effort to impress their coaches until all light failed.

The 154th Boat Race is more than four months away, but while the corporate side of the operation launched its season last night, the students have been working hard since September. Six hours a day, every day, in all weathers. This is sport at its least glamorous.

Next month, Oxford and Cambridge will each select two trial eights to race over the Tideway in London, a dress rehearsal for the big event, but for now they row up and down their home rivers, putting in a dozen miles on the water a day with fingers steadily turning as blue as their outfits.

Why do it? Because of the history and the world respect the event holds. Take John Heder, a Canadian whose grandfather was a Durham miner and saved hard to send his daughter to Cambridge. She emigrated but told her young son about the Boat Race and now, having turned 36 last week, Heder is within touching distance of representing his mother’s university.

If Heder is selected, he will shatter the race record of 31 years for the oldest rower, held by Donald Macdonald, the Oxford president in the 1987 mutiny year. Yet Oxford have their own veteran, Mike Wherley, who has won three world titles for the United States and will be 36 a fortnight before the Boat Race.

History may also be made by Nick Brodie, the Oxford president. The records are not clear, but it is believed that Brodie, elected by his peers, will be the first cox to lead a Boat Race crew. As the beaten cox last year, who had lost his place in the Oxford boat with three weeks’ notice in 2006, he has scores to settle. “I said that last year would be my final year,” Brodie, who completed an undergraduate degree in geography, said. “But as soon as we finished the race I had to give it another go.” He is now doing an MSc.

The veterans aside, it will be two relatively young crews that compete next year. Once every four years the stars prefer to prepare for the Olympic Games, leaving the stage to younger talent. Oxford found last year that British rowers who had been offered places at the university turned them down because they would not receive lottery funding; the same is affecting Cambridge. The Light Blues have only one rower who competed in last year’s win, Dan O’Shaughnessy, their president.

“We’ve had a changing of the guard,” Duncan Holland, the Cambridge head coach, said. “Last year there were five or six who were relatively certain of their seats. This year the difference between the top and bottom is less, which isn’t a bad thing for a coach. Younger people are more open to new ideas.”

Sean Bowden, the Oxford head coach, said: “I do enjoy Olympic years. It adds a different mix to the competition. It would be a shame if the boats were full of 27-year-old international rowers.”

The two universities are always on the lookout for new ways to build team spirit and get exercise. Oxford will go cross-country skiing in Davos, Switzerland, after Christmas, while Cambridge began their season with a fortnight of cycling on some of the tougher Alpine climbs of the Tour de France route.

And then there was the mission to Moscow in September when the crews were invited to race on the Moskva. For O’Shaughnessy, a Canadian, it was some experience. “My view of Russia came from Tom Clancy novels - the evil empire and all that,” he said. “But Moscow was something else, a beautiful place. We lost to an American crew that had trained heavily, but at least we beat Oxford.”

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