With one All-American honor under his belt, Florida State Seminole junior Matt Leeder is looking to improve on his sixth-place finish last year in the 3,000-meter run, where he clocked 7 minutes, 59.16 seconds at the NCAA Indoor Championships. Leeder is coming off a 51st-place finish in cross country this year and is carrying personal-best times of 4:03, 7:57 and 13:54.

You're hands are full with a recruit, can you explain that process and what you do with potential Florida State runners?

They come in for the weekend and it's on a 48-hour clock. We just set up some activities to do. One night we'll go out for a team dinner, like a steak dinner...a pretty nice dinner, with a couple of guys and the coach. If there are parents, they will come along with the recruit. The next night we'll have the entire team to go out to a pizza place and everyone just hangs out and talks and chills out.

What are your “selling points” for Florida State with recruits? What worked for you?

I'd say the trail system. The trail system is ridiculously good. There are a lot of soft surfaces around. I think, to me, coming from Canada, the weather is just incredible. I came down and was recruited when there was like snow flurries at home and I came down and could run with no shirt on, while back home I was slipping and sliding on slush and ice and had to layer up with triple layers.

You got off the plane like, “get me a pen!”?

Yeah! Seriously.

It's interesting, I was looking at your school bio and working on questions and I saw that you were from the Thousand Islands in Ontario, which less than 130 miles from me in Plattsburgh, N.Y.

Yeah, that's not far at all. I can get to the U.S. in like 15 or 20 minutes. I actually fly out of Syracuse when I fly to Florida.

So, back to the trails! How many of your miles will you log every week off of the concrete?

All my easy runs are pretty much done on the trails. We have two scheduled morning runs a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and we'll go at like 7 a.m. We do our run before hand—if you're doubling—before 7 a.m., meet at the stadium to do weights and our core session and then after it's rehab and whatnot. Those morning runs are typically done on pavement because we can't get a van out to the trail or anything. Every afternoon session that isn't on the track, is on the trails. And all of our longs runs are too, obviously. I'd say that 90% of my running is on trails right now. Once we get into the heart of track season, it will probably be about 75%.

With how many doubles?

When I first got here, my freshman year, I didn't do any doubles at all. Last year, it was about two doubles a week and now I'm at three. I usually do about five miles on Tuesday and Thursday before my weight and core. Sometimes I'll have a three or four-mile shakeout before our hardest session of the week, which is usually a Monday or a Friday.

What does that work out to be mileage-wise?

This week I hit 80, but I'm going to try to be in the 90s for the next month and try to maintain that before I have to start taking it down for some of the bigger races. I'm going to try to train through indoors as best as possible. With that being said, I want to be able to compete, so I'm going to have a little bit of a peak.

Before we get into indoor, can you wrap up your cross country season?

I'm a little bitter. I ran into a bit of a head cold going into NCAAs, but everyone has to deal with things like that. I'm a little bitter about the team situation. The team didn't perform like we were expecting. Individually, I was also kind of disappointed because I was 51st—which was a big improvement from the year before—but I was eight seconds off of being All-American. At one point in the race I was like 36^th. I lost most of my ground in the last two miles. I think I was 38^th at 8K. It's pretty frustrating I guess. Other than Nationals, I was pretty happy with the season. Regionals went really well and ACCs went as well as could be. I was happy with it all other than Nationals. When it came down to it, we just didn't have it.

You said you were going to train through indoor, but are you still setting All-American goals?

I don't want to act like that, like I'm capable of training through indoors and still making Nationals. I mean my main focus is outdoors. I definitely want to improve on my place from last year. I want to make auto, instead of just being the guy on the line, a week before, nervous about making it or not and getting the provisional. I'd rather just hit the auto and be certain I'm going.

We're talking about the three or the five?

I'm going to be running the 3K.

What about that 4:03 personal-best time you've got in the mile? Is sub-four a goal?

I'm actually going to meet with coach this week and we're going to figure out what I'm going to be racing at each meet. I'm going with a 3K at Kentucky at the end of the month. Then, two weeks later, we're going to go out to Washington to run the faster 3K out there, hopefully I'll go sub-eight there. Then, we're probably looking at the mile at ACCs or Conferences or something...then possibly a mile somewhere else. Last year we went to New York for the Armory Meet and that's where I ran that. I don't know, though, that's tough.

What are you studying at Florida State?

I'm studying psychology right now.

What are your hobbies when you get free time?

I'm pretty close with my teammates and everyone typically hangs out. Everyone is pretty close here. I'll usually go to Ciaran O'Lionaird's house. We play grudge matches in Fifa soccer on Playstation 3 or watch a movie or something. Typically on weekends, when it's nice, we'll go out to the "res". It's like a student river/lake thing. There's like a rock-climbing wall and we'll play volleyball and we barbecue. You can take your boat and tube out on the river and stuff. It's pretty nice when there's a nice weekend.

That must be good for recruiting too!

Yeah, that's what we usually do, but it's been ridiculously cold this weekend, so there's no way we could have done it.

If you could have one meal, prepared by anyone, what would have and who would make it?

(Laughs) Ah. I would probably have something by my mom. It sounds cliché, but her spaghetti dinner is incredible. I don't know what it is, what her recipe is, but it's better than any other spaghetti I've ever had in my life.

Can you give me a crazy running-related story?

All right. There's this trail right by our university that—bear with me here—is called “the rape trail”. Ted Bundy actually had a history of being at Florida and had actually taken a couple of girls off that trail. I'm dead serious that this is true. That's where it gets its name. Now the trail has emergency things every 20 meters. We do all of our morning runs on that trail or through that trail. It's really dark before 7 a.m. here. Usually it's our add-on loop. If people are going to add-on, they'll go up that. One day this girl comes into our training room in the morning and was freaking out because she thought someone had grabbed and pulled her hair and scratched her. She had a scratch on her forehead. The trainer was like, “don't worry, don't worry” and didn't know what the hell it was. We were really weirded out by it. Mike Fout was running down this trail a couple of weeks later, and he got a scratch on his head and he turns around and there's this big owl, attacking his head. There was a big scrape on his head. He just freaked out trying to hit it as it flew away. Basically, this owl is going after people just running down this trail in the morning. Coach told us to stop going down this trail...in the morning at least.

You don't tell the recruits that one, do you?

No! Well, the trail used to be really sketchy. Now it's paved and there are lights all the way down it and there are those emergency buttons everywhere.

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