Athletic ‘Aspirations From All Over’ Find Home During Summer With Riptide Running Cape Cod

SOUTH YARMOUTH – It’s eight in the morning on a bright and sunny Monday, and the members of Riptide Running Cape Cod are already about half an hour into their daily workout.

The track at Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School is the place to be during the summer for the most determined athletes looking to get faster and fitter. Not just runners. Not just Cape kids.

From the beginning of July until the end of the third week of August, Riptide Running Cape Cod, a nonprofit, meets every weekday morning, serving as a place for cross country and track and field athletes to continue to improve over the summer offseason. There’s likely no other youth track club like it in the region.

“We’re trying to fill that void a little bit,” said Adam Syty, who together with Lindsay DiBona heads the program (since its founding in 2018, the club has transitioned through different lead coaches).

Approximately 15 kids show up each morning. Some of them are from the Cape and go to local schools like Monomoy (where Syty coaches the track and field program) or Sturgis (where another Riptide coach, Kat Wood, leads the track and field program and the East campus’ cross country team). But some of the runners are only on the Cape for the summer, with origins in Boston, New Hampshire, even Arizona. 

“They come from all over,” Wood said. “It’s not just the Mid Cape.”

The program has typically been split into a “core” group — open to anyone and any kind of running background — and a “performance” group — geared more toward experienced and particularly dedicated, motivated runners looking to prepare for the upcoming season.

Brand new to Riptide this year are sessions for smaller hurdling- and sprinting-focused groups. The hurdles group especially acts as a notable training opportunity, what with the discipline being particularly harder to practice inside during the colder months.

“We’re trying to grow the Riptide program,” Syty said.

Last Monday, four hurdlers ran drills with Dylan Moreno, a Sturgis East alum and decathlete at Tufts University. Syty, Wood and Bailey Ford (another Sturgis East grad, who ran cross country and track at Suffolk University and will serve as an assistant coach for Wood at her high school alma mater) meanwhile oversaw the core and performance groups, which completed a set of 10 200-meter runs, the two minutes and 30 seconds of rest in between each making the workout that day actually a “luxurious” one, according to Syty.

Altogether, the athletes pounding Dennis-Yarmouth’s black rubber track ranged from a seventh grader to at least one graduated high school senior, truly making for a mixture of different athletes at various levels of ability, yet all with the common goal of training hard during school vacation in order to run further, faster and stronger. Some participants use the club as a way to train for other sports, like soccer or football.

“Aspirations from all over kind of working together,” Syty said.

Though the workouts certainly aren’t easy, Riptide Running Cape Cod still emanates chill, relaxed vibes. The smell of freshly mowed grass — product of a groundskeeper cutting the field inside the track — wafted as the group progressed through the set of 200-meter reps. Other runners and walkers using the facility circulated while the club practiced. By 9 a.m., Riptide’s athletes were just about wrapping up, the whole remainder of another dog day of summer theirs for the taking.

Syty will see many of them there that morning — the Monomoy kids — later next school year for indoor and outdoor track and field, ascendant programs on both the boys and girls sides at the school. Some of those athletes will first run cross country in the fall.

“It’s nice that I get to do some distance coaching and help these kids keep that continuity going,” he said.