Four Cambridge students are currently training hard for a heroic attempt to punt to Oxford.

Second year Engineering students Toby Dickens and Andy Marshall, and History student Karl Williams, all of St John’s College, along with Queens’ Natural Scientist Becky Kiff will be the first people ever to complete the 204 mile puntathon.

The expedition will take 12 days, crossing 113 locks along the way. It also involves venturing through a mile-long tunnel.

The route was calculated using Google Earth, and will take the students along the River Cam, the Great Ouse, the Middle Level Navigations, the River Nene, the Grand Union Canal, the Oxford Canal and the River Cherwell.

The crew plans to set off on June 19th and are hoping to arrive in Oxford by June 30th.

For maximum efficiency, the foursome will take turns to punt through the night. They plan to travel for at least 14 hours each day, sleeping on the punt, or on campsites along the route.

The ambitious quartet are currently challenging the rowers as the keenest sportsmen on the River Cam: "We’ve instituted a strict regime of our own. From now on there’s early morning punt training for two hours, at 6.30am. We’ll be doing this every weekday morning come rain or shine unless we don’t want to."

In August 2004, three Oxford students successfully punted from Oxford to Cambridge in 14 days. When asked whether the trip was an attempt to salve rivalry between the two towns, Andy replied: "We’ve heard some pretty wild stories about what they get up to at the Other Place – crazy things like using the wrong end of the boat and aluminum poles.

"We intend to put the record straight, and show the world that they’re not so different from us, after all."

They will not, however, be succumbing to Oxford’s strange punting techniques, and insist that they will be propelling the boat from ‘the Cambridge end’.

According to them, the Cambridge technique "requires more skill and balance than standing in the boat, as Oxford would have you do it, but we value our punters and think they all deserve a pedestal to stand on."

The voyage is not just a test of upper arm strength and Pimms drinking capacity. The crew aims to raise £2,000 for ‘Help for Heroes’, a charity supporting injured servicemen from the British Armed Forces.

Between January 2006 and February 2010 more than 3,400 military and civilian personnel were admitted to UK field hospitals. The team’s blog explains: "We wanted to do this to support all of the brave men and women in the forces who have been wounded in service because they rarely get the recognition they deserve."

The punters are excited by what Marshall describes as "turning the laziest pastime in Cambridge into an adventure". Asked to describe the journey in three words, he proffered: "making ‘impossible’ ‘improbable’".