When author Dr. Michael Collins joined the faculty at Southwestern Michigan College in 2008, he intended to turn his attention away from writing and extreme sports to teach.

But then came a Sept. 8 offer to captain the Irish national team in the World Championship Ultra Marathon, a 100K, or 62-mile race it takes more than seven hours to run in Gibraltar Nov. 7.

Most train for a year or more for such an extreme marathon, but then Collins is the unique Dowagiac resident to have been written up in Sports Illustrated (and GQ and Forbes) in 2006 for winning “Fire and Ice,” a sub-Saharan marathon in temperatures exceeding 90 degrees-plus, followed six weeks later by the treacherous North Pole Marathon in minus-35-degree temperatures.

Collins, who has run a mile in 3.54, ranked seventh in the world in 10,000 meters in 1986, 1989 and 1992. His best time for 5K is 13:28.

The compartmentalized Collins, 46, recognized “one last chance to do something great” against 192 men from 30 countries, so for a two-month crash program he upped his usual six-mile jaunt across the Elks golf course and through Riverside Cemetery to 25 miles a day, braving pit bulls on McKenzie Street and longer distances on the Kal-Haven Trail — and a rubdown by Mother Nature.

As “absurd” as it sounded when his son asked him to bring home a medal, that’s just what Collins did, bronze for a master runner older than 40.

“Of Uncertain Significance,” his ninth book he wrote since moving his family to Dowagiac from Washington state, will be published early in 2011.

Born in Limerick, Ireland, in 1964, he distinguished himself in cross country and track to the extent he received an athletic scholarship to the University of Notre Dame.

In 1999, Collins won a 100-mile Himalayan race along the India-Nepal border and the Mount Everest Challenge Marathon, considered one of the most grueling ultra-marathons in the world.

“I thought I could sneak in and sneak out and do this marathon without anyone finding out. It’s something I did for myself,” Collins told Dowagiac Rotary Club Thursday noon at Elks Lodge 889, where he was the featured speaker for its Family and Friends Night last spring.

“But it’s a small town and the cat’s out of the bag.”

Collins ran in the World Championship in Holland in 2007.

“It was one of the things that kind of defined the end of my running career,” he said. “It was the hardest race I’d ever run in my life. I got back to the World Championship and was fourth place overall. When I finished, I said to my wife (Heidi), ‘Now I’m going to go get a real job.’

“I realized that to teach full-time, I would have to give up a lot of things I really liked to do. I’d reached the pinnacle of what I wanted to do in extreme sports. The following year I applied and was accepted to teach at SMC. I set many things aside. I knew I wasn’t going to write as much or run as much, but I felt the tradeoff was worth it in being able to educate and help students at the college in a variety of ways.”

Over the last two years, Collins felt a definite “push and pull.”

He gave of himself in his new academic environment, where he teaches six courses, though it never came to wanting to leave, but to pull back and strike some balance with his personal life.

“All of us have to try to figure out how we want to balance our personal goals with our day-to-day existence of how we make money and survive,” Collins said.

His first eight months he spent in Dowagiac without his wife, who is a medical doctor, but with two of their four children.

Nora, 9, was sick with seizures and they spent a lot of time going to hospitals. “It was a difficult time,” he said.

“Even in those dark days, I would take a notebook along with me. While she was asleep in bed, I would jot down ideas for a novel and grade papers. In our day-to-day lives, we yearn to do something beyond. When I worked at Microsoft in the mid-’90s, I remember staying on at work until 11 o’clock at night, taking a five-mile run to clear my head, then come back and write from (midnight) to 3 a.m. There’s a great sense of personal validation to find time for things you really love. You can do great things from 12 to 3 in the morning. How much sleep do you really need?”

Collins added, “Even the 24 hours in the day, you can compartmentalize that and find two or three throwaway hours. My new novel coming out in January that I wrote since I’ve been at the college, I thought it was good that I was able to still be a writer as well as a teacher.”

On his daily five- or six-mile run, going through the “graveyard” day in and day out helps remind him “how precious the years are you have to live,” Collins said. “No matter how late it is or early in the morning I go running, I see the devotion people have” decorating the resting places. “It’s kind of a sobering reminder that we’re only here on a short journey.”

When the invitation came, “I went into a zone,” he said. “I’ve done this before. Can I possibly pull myself back to go from five or six miles a day to about 20 or 25 miles a day? For a week or so I monitored myself getting up to 10 to 12 miles until I felt comfortable with that. Two weeks into it I was at the Kal-Haven Trail. I was going to run out 18 miles, then I’d have to get back. That would be 36 miles. If I had to walk back, at least I would know. If I could make 36 miles on the day I could probably get the 62 miles.”

Turning around for the 18-mile return trip, “I felt exhausted, I felt sick,” Collins said. “I had a backpack with just two liters of water, so I’d run out of water. With 15 miles to go, I said to myself, ‘Just do it.’ Over the years I’ve tried connect with my Irish heritage, people from famine times having to do extraordinary things under difficult circumstances. Being descended from Michael Collins and all the great heroes who fought for Irish independence, at 21 or 22 miles, you sometimes have to talk yourself into a fury that there’s something special about you and you’re going to get home. You better do it because other, less talented people, under worse circumstances have done greater things than you have. You talk that kind of stuff to yourself and throw in a couple of curses, then you just start clipping away the miles. It took me 4 1/2 hours and I was exhausted. The Kal-Haven Trail still uses human beings to give your little $3 ticket, so there was an earthy woman who looked like Mother Nature, so Mother Nature gave me a massage. I’m not making that up. It was sweet and strange and a football weekend as well. I think Notre Dame had been beaten badly, by which I was delighted. Now I felt also that I was on a quest, just my running shoes, my little pack on my back, training for a world championship while teaching six classes.

“While 60,000 people show up to stadiums, I venture off in my car at 6 in the morning to do 35 or 40-mile runs on a Saturday. I gained a sense of confidence. This opportunity was just presented to me that was one last chance to do something great. If I had six months instead of eight weeks, I might have hesitated. You don’t think, you just jump straight into something. I say that to the kids at school, as well: Dive head-long into something. Once you’re in it, just keep swimming until you get to the end — or tread water.”

Thanks to his accelerated training regimen, “I know every pit bull and dog on McKenzie Street,” Collins said. “It’s a communal experience. My wife drives and my kids are my protection. My son rides shotgun and scans for pit bulls on the horizon. Being attacked by dogs gives you a little bit of adrenaline rush. We did a lot of 30-mile runs as a family. It’s important for my son (Eoin), who just turned 7, and the girls at 4 and 5, because this was a big part of my past life and I regretted they were never at these races and never saw me. The best weekend I had was 42 miles on a Saturday and 28 on a Sunday three weeks before Gibraltar. At that stage, I thought I was going to finish, so I asked my dad to meet up. Then in the last two weeks, I began to get a cocky confidence that I was going to try to compete with 192 runners from 30 countries. I hoped for a top 50 finish and I finished 49th, the third person over 40. I shouldn’t have been able to do it in six or eight weeks, but a belief comes upon you.

“Sometimes people just lose their way, like the Notre Dame football program. I was able to instill drive in myself. My son wanted me to bring back a medal for him, which seemed absurd with guys training year-round. My dad’s 75. He was my food man for the seven-hour, 15-minute race. I had to quickly educate him on carbs and protein and pain-killing rubs. Many of the other teams, the Americans, Italians and English, had physiotherapists and massage tables. Our team is pretty much three guys. Sometimes I think if you have less, you can do more with it. Every time I came around and didn’t have a table, something within you says despite everything, I’m going to finish and kick most of the people’s asses in the world. Each lap, the more you see what people have at their disposal, the more it excites you to do well. On that particular day, to make matters worse, my dad got conjunctivitis and had two green tusks coming out of his eyes.”

Of course Collins tackling a 62-mile race never thinks of such a distance in those terms.

It’s just three-mile laps.

Nineteen times.

Masters are identified by “M’s” on the back of their jerseys.

Eight laps in, “I could see some maybe 10 minutes ahead of me, so I started picking the 17 ahead of me off slowly. Slowly but surely, from 33 miles on to 50, you compartmentalize races. You can’t say, ‘I’m running 62 miles.’ If you did that, you’d never finish. You try to say, ‘I’m running a three-mile route 19 times. Just do another one.’

“I tell the kids that at school: ‘Break it up in little parts, then when you look back you’ll see you’ve completed a huge task.’ With two laps to go, my dad said I was just outside the medals. You don’t want to run too fast and risk seizures. I think 42 competitive people who had to get onto their national teams, dropped out. Lying on the ground, holding their legs, despite all their massages. I’m proud that on my last lap, mine was the seventh fastest in the race, 46 against guys in their 20s. I just laid it all out there and ran like a maniac.”

Being the “No. 1 Irish guy” with his father there to share it, Collins gets emotional recalling the fleeting moment.

“That was Sunday,” he said. “Monday morning, by 5 o’clock, I had said goodbye to my dad and was on a plane back to America. I came in at 1:30 Tuesday morning to South Bend. No time for celebrating. By 8 o’clock Tuesday morning, I was teaching until 9 p.m., so forgive me if I cried thinking about it. It disappeared as quickly as it was there, but in talking to the kids at school, I keep on saying I understand how hard their lives are. I give them a lot of breaks and don’t demand they hand in everything on time — ‘just find a day or a week when you can catch up and rectify your life.’

“Another part of doing the race, aside from my son and my dad and things like that, it was for the kids up at school. It’s hard to be a teacher who’s accomplished and successful to be speaking to them as though you have no hardship in your life. Doing something like this, I was at least able for those six or eight weeks, to explain to them what I was going through and the amount of hours it took to train. To teach them to make a commitment for themselves to get through this semester and not fall by the wayside. I think in some respects it was as though I was teaching a class for them in endurance. Even when you make it, you always try to do better and to have some goals for yourself.”