When children in the gifted program at Tudor Elementary return to school next week, teacher Debbie Cropper will take them on a no-passport-needed tour of Australia by bringing to the classroom the materials and knowledge she picked up during a recent trip to the Southern Hemisphere.

She'll show them a boomerang and a didgeridoo, she'll put together a slide show set to traditional music, she'll display aboriginal art, she'll introduce them to aboriginal legends, and she'll teach them the many similarities between Alaska and Australia. Then she'll put the students to work creating their own stories in mural form with the use of aboriginal dream-time symbols.

Sometime during the five-week unit, she'll share a story from her own Australia adventure -- the one where Cropper goes Down Under and comes out on top.

Cropper, 49, won the women's title and finished third overall in the July 31 Australian Outback Marathon, a mostly off-road race on the red earth around Ayers Rock, one of the Australia's best-known landmarks.

Two weeks later, Cropper is ready to defend her title Sunday in the Humpy's Marathon, where she's the three-time reigning champ.

Two weeks isn't much recovery time for a marathoner, but Cropper has become accustomed to quick turnarounds between the 26.2-mile races. In the year since her last victory at Humpy's, she has run nine marathons to edge closer to her goal of running a marathon in each of the 50 states. She's up to 39, with plans to check off Wisconsin and Illinois before the end of this year. She hopes to get the remaining nine by the middle of next summer.

"I turn 50 in July 2011, so it's 50 in 50," Cropper said. "Then I'll focus on the continents."

No matter where running takes her, Cropper views her journeys through the eyes of a teacher. She's always on the lookout for information about a location's history, geography, geology, culture or industry that she can bring home to share with students. To her, the best souvenir is one that performs like a textbook.

She has shared with her students sand from the beaches of the Atlantic Ocean and chocolate from the Ghirardelli factory in San Francisco. When she ran a marathon in Minnesota last year, she visited the Lake Superior Maritime Museum and came home with a unit on shipping ports that included a field trip to the Anchorage port.

Last year she taught a unit on the 50 states that was supplemented by objects sent to her by members of the 50 States Marathon Club she has met over the years. A runner from Ohio sent a Buckeye football and some chocolates made with buckeye nuts.

"I write quite a bit of my units during my travels," Cropper said. "I get inspired when I'm learning myself about the place I'm traveling to. I pick up teaching materials and bring them back."

Cropper teaches gifted students in grades 2 through 6, and while all ages will learn about Australia this fall, she'll adapt the unit so it's appropriate for each grade level.

She said she hadn't decided how to kick off the school year at Tudor Elementary -- a new school for Cropper, who taught at Willow Crest Elementary last school year -- until inspiration struck during her trip to Australia last month.

"I'll give them a taste of the culture in general and show them how (Australia) connects to Alaska, with the aboriginal culture and subsistence living," Cropper said. "The country is so huge that, like Alaska, you have to fly in order to get anywhere.

"The main idea is to get them to identify and connect to the world. We're at the top of the world and (Australia) is at the bottom, yet we are still so much alike."

Cropper began combining her two passions -- teaching and running -- after becoming a teacher in the Anchorage School District's IGNITE program for gifted students in 2005.

"It started out by me going to visitors centers and finding a fact about the state," said Cropper, who enters races that coincide with school breaks and weekends and travels on the cheap -- she has even slept in a rental car to save money.

"I have a big wall map of the states, and always after a race I'd bring in my medal if I won one and we'd talk about the difference between being proud of yourself and bragging, and then I'd teach them something about the state and we'd make connections."

Cropper spent most of her life in California, raising her children and working in the restaurant industry, often as a server, for 33 years. She moved to Alaska in 2002 and started working as a teacher's assistant that same year. She had earned a teaching certificate in 2005, when she was 44.

Just like she became a teacher in midlife, Cropper became a runner somewhat late in the game. She was 34 when she entered her first 10-kilometer race, even though she wasn't a runner. She won it anyway.

"I walked every day and I always did sports in school, but I was always just average. I was active but not focused," Cropper said. "I did that one race, and then four years later I did a marathon with Team in Training."

She debuted with a sub-4-hour performance in the 1999 Maui Marathon (3 hours, 58 minutes, 10 seconds). She ran four more marathons over the next four years, and then decided to run a marathon in every state. She ran three in both 2004 and 2005, six in both 2006 and 2007, eight in 2008 and 10 last year. Sunday's will be her seventh marathon of this year.

And every time she enters a marathon, she races. She isn't a walker. She's a runner.

And she is like a metronome. In six of her last eight marathons, she has posted times of 3:16, 3:18, 3:18, 3:18, 3:19 and 3:21. The others were the swift 3:12 in Australia -- her third-best time -- and a 3:36 on a hilly course in West Virginia, where she finished second among women.

Cropper's personal best is a 3:10:41, set in February 2009 at the Mercedes Marathon in Alabama. Her second-best time is the 3:14:9 that won Humpy's last year.

That Cropper's times are getting better as she gets older is unusual, but it's not a mystery. About two years ago, she changed how she trains.

"I was running too much and not varying my running. I had to do so many miles in a day," she said. "Now I'm cross-training with swimming and yoga, eating more and taking days off."

"Days off" is a relative term for someone who travels and races as much as Cropper, who has run one marathon per month since February.

"I just ran a marathon two weeks ago," she said of her preparations for Humpy's on Sunday, "so whatever happens happens."