GREENSBORO, N.C. — Before the mile race, Guilderland’s Noah Tindale researched the best times across the country and knew he had a very good chance of taking first place at the New Balance Outdoor Nationals last weekend. He crossed the finish line first, with a lead of 3.74 seconds.

Tindale, 14, finished at 4:31.94 in the junior-high national race, a time that he said could have been better if he had been pushed by other runners at his heels. He even ran for the first 200 meters to see if anyone would strain with him, but it didn’t happen. The handful of runners across the nation that have similar records to his, at 4:24, didn’t compete, he said.

“There was no one really to pull me through, and I understood that before the race,” said Tindale. “It all depends on the type of race and the people.”

The eighth-grader at Guilderland’s Farnsworth Middle School made headlines earlier in the season when he broke the New York State record for his grade in the 1600-meter race. He said, by senior year, he would like break 4 minutes in the mile.

“That’s been an ultimate dream of mine,” said Tindale, who has been spending time at high school tracks since he was around 3 years old, since his father, Bill Tindale, is a coach.

For all of his excitement about his victory, making him the top eighth-grade miler in the United States, Tindale said some of the “coolest” things at the New Balance Outdoor Nationals competition were the backpack of gear he got, and meeting the small group of some of the fastest runners his age from across the country.

As he flashed around the track, he saw his image on a big screen and listened to the announcers talk about the individual runners and their performances.

“They did a really great job on saying specifics,” said Tindale, who hopes to someday work in sports broadcasting.

His father is Guilderland’s distance coach for the boys’ track and field team, which started a leadership council for the first time this year. Any athletes who went through the application process were on the council. Almost 20 students hashed out ideas about how to improve performance and social ties on the entire team.

All of the runners on the relay team — Tindale, sophomore Noah Carey, and seniors John Feil and Andrew Burns — were on the council, Coach Tindale said. They had an overall time last weekend of 17:46.60 in the 4 x 1 mile relay and came in sixth place. The relay team took second place in the 4 x 800 race during the state championships on June 13.

Having been mentored by student runners all of his life, and recently being embraced by the upperclassmen on the track team, Noah Tindale says he’s motivated by his teammates, even in his solo races.

“If you can have a team that can do things together and work as one unit, then anything is possible,” said Tindale. “And we’ve shown that, I think, as a team.”

He added, “The reason our team is growing exponentially and getting so much better is because we have the older guys who are helping the younger guys out.”

Brandon Ford, a Guilderland seventh-grader, came in 15th place out of the 28 who ran the junior-high mile at the national competition. His time was 4:56.82.

“From what I could find, he was the second fastest seventh grader that ran the race,” Coach Tindale said.

Other Guilderland athletes competed in North Carolina at the New Balance Nationals.

Emily Burns finished sixth in the girls’ 2000-meter steeplechase, running 7:06.60. She ran the first leg in the 4 x 1 mile relay with Emily Bini, Jennifer Hoffmann, and Sarah Forman; the relay team took 14th place with an overall time of 20:59.10.

That same relay team was number seven in the 4 x 800 girls’ race with a time of 9:25.34.

Emily Bini came in 13th place for the junior high one-mile run, with a time of 5:23.31.

A team of Guilderland sprinters — Cara Mortarti, Liana Alford, Mia Ermolenko, and Sarah Forman — finished ninth in the 1600-meter sprint medley emerging elite race in 4:15.56.