Surprise Boston winner Caroline Rotich is fit and ready for New York

— -- Editor's note: This story originally appeared at Runnersworld.com.

A month after she became the surprise winner of this year's Boston Marathon, Kenya's Caroline Rotich called her coach. She didn't want to discuss the day's workout or a hamstring niggle or strategy for an upcoming race. Instead, coach Ryan Bolton told Runner's World, "She had been doing a lot of promotional work and she said, 'I'm ready for this to be over. I want to train.'"

Although she has long been involved in the Santa Fe, New Mexico, running scene and had a solid competitive record before her Boston win, in the larger running world, Rotich was one of many 2:23 female Kenyan marathoners, rather than a household name. Now, she said, she gets recognized everywhere, and there are more demands on her time.

"My coach used to tell me, 'If you win big races, your life is going to change,'" Rotich said earlier this month. "So I was a little prepared, and I'm having fun with it, but you really don't know what it's like until you're there."

Rotich, 31, is definitely "there" now. At Sunday's New York City Marathon, her rivals will look at her differently than in her two previous appearances at the race. Any move Rotich makes will be covered, and any Rotich presence in the closing miles will be feared.

"Winning Boston gives you that extra swagger and extra confidence," Bolton said. "I've told her it's important to have that and feel that. But it's also important to keep that in check and don't get overconfident."

Three-continent journey

Balancing confidence and ambition isn't new to Rotich. At key points in her life, she has trusted her instincts about which path to follow, even when there was little obvious immediate payoff in doing so.

As a teen in Nyahururu, Kenya, Rotich attracted the attention of a coach from Sendai Ikuei Gakuen High School in Japan, which has a tradition of recruiting promising young Kenyans. (The late Sammy Wanjiru, the 2008 Olympic Marathon champion, also studied there.) Despite not knowing Japanese, she left home and soon after celebrated her 14th birthday 7,000 miles from home. After graduating from high school, Rotich stayed in Japan.

"I was trying to help some of the Kenyans coming there to learn Japanese," she said. "But I decided I wanted to be more serious about running and make it my job. I felt like I was not going to reach my goals if I stayed there."

So Rotich returned to Kenya in 2004. She trained there, mostly in anonymity, for two years until Scott Robinson, a manager with ties to Santa Fe, noticed her at a training camp in the tea-growing town of Kericho. Afterward, Rotich again uprooted herself and came to the United States in 2006.

Robinson encouraged the runners he managed to race frequently at second-tier events with decent but not lucrative prize money. Such a model values consistently good-enough fitness and a mercenary mindset over peaking for a few key races each year that demand total engagement.

In 2008, Robinson met Bolton through a mutual acquaintance. Robinson asked Bolton to work with his stable of runners.

Bolton, however, was not a fan of near-weekly racing. As a runner -- he placed 12th in the 1995 NCAA cross country championship, three places and two seconds behind Meb Keflezighi -- and then an Olympic triathlete, he had seen the benefit of racing less frequently but being fully prepared to do so. That approach guided his philosophy when, after retiring as an athlete, he started coaching runners and triathletes.

Rotich met Bolton in 2009. He told her his vision of working toward bigger races with bigger paydays, forgoing the smaller but more reliable prize money from regional events. Going with Bolton -- who said, "I can't be a part-time coach; they're either on board 100 percent or zero percent" -- would require Rotich to make another big choice.

"I knew I either needed to go with the manager or the coach," Rotich said. "I felt confident in what I wanted to accomplish. So I went with Ryan."

Long-term plan

The big-picture view has paid off. Rotich ran Rock 'n' Roll Las Vegas, her first marathon outside of Kenya, in December 2009. Her 2:29:47 won the race, and $25,000. She ran her personal best of 2:23:22 to place fourth at the 2012 Chicago Marathon. She placed seventh in her two previous New York City appearances, in 2010 and 2011. ("Wow, that's a long time ago," Rotich said when reminded her last five-boroughs marathon was four years ago.)

The win in Boston in April was another big jump forward. Rotich sees it as the next logical step in a process put in motion years ago.

"I didn't start training for the marathon when I was 20, 21, 22, like a lot of the women now," she said. "The other thing is that I didn't want to run marathons just because it was the thing to do. I felt like I wanted to do it only when I was ready to do it well."

Rotich and Bolton resisted the temptation of cashing in on post-Boston opportunities, given how doing so could compromise the principles that led to her Boston win.

"One thing some of her competitors don't do is that Caro really goes through cycles of rest and down time," Bolton said. "She ran the [New York] Mini 10K [on June 13] because the New York Road Runners wanted her to run. But she'd just come off weeks of almost no running at all. I knew the next very important race for her is this fall. So at that time, the emphasis was to get her really recovered."

Rotich finished 11th in 33:30, not far off the per-mile pace of her marathon PR. The race was won in 31:15 by Mary Keitany, who won the 2014 NYC Marathon and had finished second at the London Marathon a week after Rotich's Boston victory.

"I'm like, wow, this is soon after London, are they not taking a break?" Bolton said. "All year long they're pumping out impressive times. That's not our approach. Caro will go through a big cycle of resting and recovering, taking a mental break, and she'll lose some fitness. But then she's ready to turn it when she really needs to be on."

Rotich will face defending champion Keitany again on Sunday. Bolton thinks Rotich is ready for the challenge.

"She's had a better buildup than before Boston," he said. "I've been able to add a little more volume. New York is more of a strength course than Boston. In New York, the worst hills are in the last miles, and it's tough stuff. Her strength is in a good place."

And Rotich is looking forward to the challenge. 

"I love racing in New York," said Rotich, who won the NYC Half Marathon in 2011 and 2013. "I know [the marathon course] is not as fast as some of the other races, but sometimes you have to feel it in your heart. You go where you want to be."