In 1986, the Boston Marathon, the oldest annual marathon in the world, awarded prize money to its top male and female finishers for the first time in its then eighty-nine-year history: the handlebar-mustached Australian Robert de Castella took home sixty thousand dollars and a Mercedes-Benz for his 2:07:51 win—a course record worth an extra twenty-five thousand dollars—while the women’s winner, Norway’s Ingrid Kristiansen, received thirty-five thousand dollars and a Benz, too. Since then, records for both genders have improved a combined seven times at Boston, and the race’s purse has gotten fatter. This year, the winners each received a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, making it the second-most lucrative marathon in the world, behind only Dubai, which has a two-hundred-thousand-dollar prize. Just nine other marathons, including the rest of the so-called world majors—Tokyo, London, Berlin, New York, and Chicago—offer fifty thousand dollars or more to winners.

On Monday, Caroline Rotich, a thirty-year-old Kenyan, finished first at Boston, with a time of 2:24:55. Rotich has been running professionally for twelve years. The most she’d ever won at a race before this week was twenty-five thousand dollars, for first place at the smaller and less competitive Prague Marathon. The six-figure payday from Boston is more than she made in the past two years combined.

“If a Kenyan says you live in the middle of nowhere, then you really live in the middle of nowhere,” Rotich told me two days after her win. “That’s me.” Rotich has lived and trained in New Mexico for the past nine years, but she grew up in a village four and a half hours from Nairobi, and ninety minutes from the nearest real town. Her large family, who farm corn and potatoes there, don’t have electricity or running water. Though she recently helped them upgrade “from a hut to a house,” they live in much the same way they did twenty years ago. She sees this when she returns twice a year with stories—and hopefully winnings—from America.

About those winnings: thirty per cent of her Boston prize was immediately deducted for taxes. Another fifteen per cent went to her agent, Isaya Okwiya, a Maryland doctor and part-time athlete representative from Kenya. Okwiya shares a small portion of his allotment with Ryan Bolton, Rotich’s coach, who accepts a reduced fee from African runners. That leaves eighty-two thousand five hundred dollars. Rotich says she’ll send at least ten thousand back to Kenya to pay the tuition of five relatives. Another fifteen to twenty thousand will be set aside for her rent and expenses in Santa Fe. She wants to invest in some Kenyan ventures, such as an apartment complex that a brother will manage. So now there’s perhaps thirty or forty thousand dollars of the Boston purse remaining. Not bad.

“But your running career is relatively short—maybe four to eight more years for Caro,” Bolton said, adding, “Buying a Porsche wouldn’t make sense. She needs to win ten more Bostons before she does that. She’s got to think long term. So for now, she lives like a monk and a runner, which are sort of the same thing.”

Asked whether she’ll spend any of her winnings on something nice for herself, Rotich paused for a moment before responding, “Maybe a new mattress, to sleep for twenty-four hours.” Her average pace at Boston was an exhausting five minutes and thirty-two seconds per mile. At Boston, she said, “I didn’t even know how much they were paying until I was done.” She added, “The more I think about money [while running], I go backward. You must run with your heart first.”

Deena Kastor won the 2005 Chicago Marathon, and then ran the 2006 London Marathon in 2:19:36, still an American women’s record. For that first achievement, she received a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, an amount that Kastor, now forty-two, said “could have added comforts”—but she instead chose to give much of it away to charity. It helped that she comes from some money. “I grew up in the beautiful suburban town of Agoura Hills, in Southern California,” she wrote in an e-mail. “My family was comfortable but not ostentatiously so. My first year as a professional runner, I survived off family support, waitressing, and gear from my sponsor. Once I showed promise, I signed a contract with a shoe company, which allowed me to quit my waitressing job.”

That company, Asics, has been her sponsor for the past decade and a half, during which time she’s had “some seven-figure years.” A handful of big-name racers—typically Americans like Kastor and Ryan Hall—are paid simply to arrive at the starting line. Rotich, on the other hand, went into the Boston Marathon without a sponsor; in the past, she has represented Mizuno, but that contract had expired just before Boston. Thanks to her win, she’s now being feverishly courted by a number of shoe brands.

“Bonuses from races and sponsors can add up to quite a bit,” Kastor said. “But the motivation to win can’t be financial; [it] needs to come from a deep desire to improve, extend your boundaries, and search the depths of your character in the name of progress and the craving for perfection.”

Kastor says that she relinquishes roughly the same proportion of her winnings to taxes, agents, and coaches as Rotich—though Kastor’s coach is her husband, so that fraction of the pie stays with the couple, who “live simply” in the mountains of Mammoth Lakes, California. Kastor will receive sponsor money as long as she races, and perhaps even a few years beyond that.

Mbarak Hussein, a Kenya native who is now a U.S. citizen, won five marathons between 1998 and 2006. They are regarded as second-tier races—Honolulu and Twin Cities were his bread and butter—but winning so many is still a rare feat. Among serious distance runners in New Mexico, where he lives, Hussein, now fifty, is a legend. “Running is not a long-term career,” he said yesterday. “You come in and have maybe two to three years of really running and making good money. I was lucky to have more than that.”

Like many top marathoners, he ran two marathons annually, one in the spring and one in the fall. In his best year, 2002, he made roughly forty thousand dollars before deductions. Fifty per cent of his winnings, he said, went to taxes, agents, managers, and coaches. As for the rest, he said, “I bought property in Kapsabet, my home town. But the biggest thing is: invest in yourself. Create savings to be comfortable for the next six months or so ... and you don’t have to stress going from race to race thinking about money.”

The winning purse, he said, “looks like big bucks, but the money goes quickly. Sometimes you’ll go a whole year without racing. You get injuries and you don’t get an income. If you don’t have that savings, it can be really tight.”

When he was winning consistently, did he ever indulge in an American automotive fantasy? “I bought a car in 2002,” he said. “Not a fancy car: a Toyota Camry. I still have it. Those cars run a long time.”