A slightly rainy evening after a weekend of torrential rain and floods meant our gardening job was postponed until things were less muddy, but continuing the watery theme our backup task was ideally suited.

Earthwatch, the people behind TinyForests, also do a big national water quality survey to assess the health of our rivers and waterways. Our task this night was to walk and run out to four different spots on the River Lea to collect water samples to test for nitrate and phosphate levels, two indicators that things are getting into the river that shouldn't be, like fertilisers from farms and sewage from towns.

We spend many of our sessions running by the river, working next to the river, and sometimes even in the river, so it's good to know what lies beneath the ripples! We collected water from the new Hat Garden section on Bute street, Wardown lake, Runfold Avenue and all the way to Leagrave Park for a photo with Bob Marley and a total run distance of 12km, our longest in quite a while. Fishing for water with a test tube on a string along the way was quite fun!

I got the water samples home and conducted the tests, and I am pleased to report that the levels detected were classed as 'moderate', so not too bad. The levels were quite consistent throughout the length we tested so its good to know that it doesn't get any worse as it passes through town.

This week for our group run we ran up the hill through High Town to our task on Hitchin road where community clean-up coordinator Kevin from ABCD Luton and some local residents had already got started.

A couple of road-side areas were overgrown with shrubs and weeds and needed cutting back and tidying up. On arrival our team were tooled up with shears, saws, loppers and brushes and set to cutting back and clearing up.

With our large team we managed to clean up a huge stretch of road and filled an amazing five big bags of cuttings which needed dragging up the hill to the point that the council was booked to collect from.

Before retreating back down the hill we took a few minutes to do a few rounds of walking lunges, crunches and squats in the park to round off an energetic evening.

This week a rainbow shone over our warm-up and the ascent up the hill to our task for the evening.

We were heading to the gravel sign that welcomes drivers from the M1 into Luton where some patchy weeds needed clearing. We also took some time to rearrange the black and white pebblrs to restore some clarity to the letters which were suffering from some blurred lines!

When the task was completed we headed over to Stockwood Park for a blast through some sprint intervals to build some power in our legs before heading back down to our finish point back in the Hat District.