By the time you've read this opening sentence, Papamoa athlete Joseph Millar has managed to sprint 60 metres.

And with his sights firmly fixed on the Olympic Games in Rio next year, he's hoping to realise his dream thanks to a word of advice from the world's fastest man, Usain Bolt.

Papamoa's Joseph Millar has next year's Rio Olympics in his sights. Photo: Supplied.

Currently New Zealand's fastest man on two feet, the three-time national 100m and 200m champion ran 60m in just 6.84 seconds on Saturday.

The 23-year-old joined the Papamoa Athletics Club as a youngster to see just how fast he could run. As it turns out, he was a natural.

'I've been doing athletics for about 11 years now,” says Joseph. 'I was always fast, but I used to play hockey and I wanted to know how fast I could be without anyone in my way and without lugging around a stick.”

His climb through athletic's ranks has seen him acquire a hard work attitude which has seen become the country's top sprinter.

'I guess I had a little bit of speed on me and it got to the point where I started to be in the top three in the country.

'I'd talk to some of the other competitors and they would talk about how they were going to train and how hard they were going to work.”

The decision was made to step his work rate in order to compete with his opponents.

'I listened to everything they said and I tried to match it all or do even better. In the end, it turned out that most of them were all talk, but I ended up doing the work, thinking that they were doing it as well.”

Joseph has represented his country at youth and junior level but now wants to represent New Zealand in the senior ranks.

'We've got the Rio Olympics next year,” he says. 'To go there and run for New Zealand would be something special.”

He's even had the opportunity to meet the world's fastest man, Usain Bolt, when the world and Olympic champion visited New Zealand three years ago.

'He was only supposed to spend 30 minutes with us and ended up spending an hour. He was quite impressed with my ability. He said I reminded him of a younger version of himself, so I was pretty stoked to hear that.”

The 76kg sprinter, who has been clocked at 40km/h, says he has a long way to go to get up to the speed of Usain's 45km/h.

But with some of the training tips given to him by the Jamaican superstar, he is confident of making the qualifying time of 10.16 seconds for the 100m and 20.50 seconds for the 200m that will get him to Rio.

'He took me aside and had a word to me,” says Joseph. 'One of the things he said was ‘if you're training and the quality starts to drop off, then have another minutes rest. There is no point in training to run poorly'.

'He told me you have to train properly – you can't train to run fast by running slow.”

And he admits he often thinks of Usain's words when he is training, especially with new coach Paul Gamble from AUT Millennium.

'The coach that I'm with now uses that a lot in his training,” he says.

'We're less about hard slog, which is the traditional New Zealand way of training, and we go out and try to do things the best we can.

'We don't teach the body what it's like to run slow. Everything is done fast and everything is done properly.”

The sprinter was side-lined last season with a recurring knee injury which put paid to his chances of making the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. But so far, his recovery has progressed well.

Joseph's current personal best of 10.32 back in 2013 puts him 0.05 seconds away from the New Zealand residents' record set by Chris Donaldson at Hamilton's Porritt Stadium in 1999.

At six foot tall (188cm), he's slightly taller than the average sprinter, but says his height hasn't been a disadvantage.

'It doesn't really seem to change much. When I look at the Olympics there is such a range of body types. There doesn't seem to be any body types that slot in to being a sprinter.”

Joseph says he is a strong finisher when it comes to the sprints, and if he is ahead at the 60m mark, there aren't too many people who can run him down. Let's hope that's the case in Rio.