Wairoa mayor’s son, William Little, poised for Serbian cross-country champs

It’s a tale of from cross country to cross-country, little by little and now in giant leaps for a Hawke’s Bay runner named this week in an Athletics New Zealand World Championships team.

Just turned 24, William Little, son of Wairoa Mayor Craig Little and wife Jan, and a former pupil of Lindisfarne College in Hastings, is the consummate late-bloomer.

Once hit by health issues which had him barely daring to dream, now he’s off to the cross-country championships in Serbia on March 30.

He’s the only senior men’s runner in the team of 18 otherwise comprising 12 under-20 competitors and five for the senior women’s event, self-funded by the athletes needing qualifying times, which Little achieved on the track in Melbourne last month.

It was at Lindisfarne less than eight years ago, in Years 12 and 13 that he started running competitively.

There were early signs that he had talent and had benefitted from running around the farm with his mum when she trained for such events as the Lake to Lighthouse, an endurance beast from Waikaremoana to Wairoa.

By the time he left school, and having started training and running with Napier Harriers, he’d twice broken the school’s senior cross-country records. On the track at the nearby regional sports park he set new school records in the 800m, 1500m and 3000m, and he’d helped Lindisfarne to a “Toughest School” trophy in Rotorua.

Despite the early success, Little hadn’t developed particular aspirations, finding an iron deficiency kept making him sick and disrupted the training that was needed to get any better, he said.

Little said it was only when the health issues were resolved that the aspirations came into play, and 2023 became the “break-out year”.

Now based in Auckland, he works in corporate and financial law with Mayne Wetherell in the Wynyard Quarter, lives in nearby Ponsonby, and has the streets and the Auckland Domain as the focus of his training.

Last year he had a North Island cross-country championships win and fifth-placing at the national championships; a New Zealand road-relay title with Auckland-based club the Whippets Running Project; personal bests on the track from 1500m to 5km; and the fastest 10km on the road in the country.

His 29min 14sec, 11th-place run in the Australasian 10km at the Zatopek: 10 meeting in Melbourne last month “snagged” a qualifying time for the cross-country venture, and he ran a 5000m personal best of 13min 50.04sec for second in the Night of 5s at the AUT Millennium track at Rosedale, Auckland, on December 16.

It’s raised his sights higher, aiming now for more personal bests before heading to Serbia, including targeting a first national championships individual medal, in the 3000m in Wellington in March, a field expected to include Olympic Games 1500m hopeful Sam Tanner.

This weekend he runs the New Zealand Mile Championship at Whanganui’s Cooks Classic, and next week the national 3000m championship at the Capital Classic in Wellington, where the opposition is expected to include fellow former Lindisfarne pupil Matt Taylor.

As for any hopes of a personal four-minute-mile in Whanganui, Little says: “I’m not really a mile runner. We’ll see how it goes”.