THEY must think they've done the hard bit. Just getting to the end of an almost absurdly long season is an achievement in itself.

Rugby has long moved on from being a contact sport peopled by essentially cuddly amateurs to a collision sport whose exponents are not just fitter and faster, but bigger, heavier and several times harder, while the playing season has expanded in a similar fashion.

If the season's start has been reasonably well safe-guarded – there's still not much call for the competitive campaign to start before the beginning of September – the same cannot be said about its end.

Not so long ago the only competitive rugby played in May were the sevens tournaments played in Scotland. More recently the Heineken Cup final provided a fitting finale.

Then came the introduction of the play-offs system in the Premiership; a guaranteed Twickenham final between two English clubs seemed a far more satisfying way of bringing down the season's curtain than a match that would only be staged in England every four years and might hold no English interest.

Almost before anyone had got used to that, England's end of season fixture against the Barbarians became enshrined in the calendar and Wales, desperate for cash to fund their deal with the regions, jumped on board as well.

Like it or not, the domestic competitive rugby season now extends for a full nine months.

But the game's top players have no time to pat themselves on the back for emerging unscathed from a punishingly-hard season, and even less time to put their feet up and book a holiday.

They know that, especially in World Cup year, it will only be a matter of days before their international coaches, advisers and strength and conditioning experts start to demand their own pound of flesh.

The latter may privately acknowledge that many of their charges are knackered but, in public at least, they are not going to be denied their time in the spotlight.

Their raison d'etre is defined by success in Test matches and the quadrennial World Cup provides the starkest of measuring sticks.

Desperate for any edge in the autumn, the fitness gurus have set their sights on the summer.

This, they believe, is where the hard work necessary to win a World Cup gets done and, as far as they are concerned there's no time to waste. It's not just the established and better resourced that believe that a "beasting" at this time of the year will pay dividends when the competition starts in earnest.

Even Fiji, that most laid-back and naturally-gifted of rugby nations, has become a slave to the mantra of "no pain, no gain", and their success in the last World Cup would suggest that their players are about to experience a lot of training-ground pain.

They know that four years ago in France they were taken to the wire in their previous pool matches before an amazing, quarter-final-securing, victory over Wales was sealed by a late try.

Their players attributed their resilience to pre-tournament sessions on the sand-dunes of Sigatoka and the mud run of Tongalevu.

In pre-tournament training, the players would regularly be rousted from their beds at 5am and driven through an ever more demanding series of exercises on awesome natural obstacles which, in the photographs, resemble near-vertical hills of sand.

And Wales, once again in the same pool as the islanders, are going to the other extreme of temperature in a bid to avoid a repeat of their 2007 embarrassment.

A wider World Cup squad of 45 players is off to Poland for a spot of cryotherapy, in which normal training is interspersed with regular visits to a special chamber where the temperature is reduced by stages to minus 130 degrees.

When it comes to planning World Cup success, suffering seems to be the name of the game, although none of the competing teams is likely to go as far as South Africa did in 2003.

Kamp Staalraad was a military-style boot-camp, where players were ordered into a freezing lake to pump up rugby balls underwater, crawl naked across gravel and climb into a foxhole and sing the national anthem, while ice-cold water was poured over their heads.

England's intentions are to work with the Marines at Lympstone, just as they have done in advance of the last two tournaments.

Even for those Saxons whose season, amazingly, has still a couple of matches to run, they seem almost tame by comparison.