It was still dark, and he was nursing a cold. But at 4:45 Wednesday morning, Boston Police Commissioner William Evans set out on his daily run, determined, as always, to get in his miles.
As he cut through the predawn air, he kept an eye out for suspicious activity and scanned the road for potholes to report to the mayor’s office. And of course, for the cabdriver who rides alongside him some mornings to complain about Uber.
Mostly, he enjoyed being free from his cellphone as he looped around South Boston, chatting easily with his running partner, Josh Nemzer, about the news, his wife and kids, and his upcoming marathon. This will be his 50th, a testament to his love of distance running and its restorative powers.
“You see a lot of terrible things on this job,” Evans said. “This is my medicine.”
His daily runs, before most anyone is awake, give Evans a keen vantage point of Boston’s neighborhoods and the problems they face, a block-by-block tour that frames the day’s work.
“There's no better way to get the pulse of a place than by being on the street,” said Nemzer, a road race organizer who has worked for the Boston Athletic Association. “Somebody in his spot, he keeps close to the city. He knows what’s going on at 4:30 in the morning.”
On Sunday, Evans is hoping to run the Shipyard Maine Coast Marathon if he kicks his cold and there is no outburst of violence or calamity he has to attend to.
When he started running, Evans never dreamed he would finish a marathon. Even after he got hooked on the distance, the idea of running 50 didn’t occur to him.
But now, the rail-thin 57-year-old shows no signs of slowing down, and is already looking ahead to his next marathon in the fall, although he hasn’t decided which one it will be.
“Someone mentioned to me Iceland. My barber wants me to go to Greece and run the Greek marathon. Josh is talking about more of a local one,” he said. “The verdict is out.”
Evans, who in February was featured in Runner’s World, ran his first marathon in Boston in 1989, and set his personal best of 2:51 at Boston the following year. He has run marathons in London, Quebec City, and Disney World, where he stopped along the way to pose for pictures with Disney characters.
Outside of fracturing his knee in a fluke accident with his dog, he has stayed injury-free by staying within his limits, even though he runs nearly every day.
On weekday mornings, Evans and Nemzer hit the streets before 5 a.m. for a 5- or 6-mile run, no matter how little sleep they got the night before. On weekends, they go much longer, logging runs as long as three hours all through the city.
Together, Evans and Nemzer have run through every neighborhood in the city, taking long detours through Somerville and Chelsea to avoid running through tunnels. The traffic is usually so light, they can cut straight down the center of the road. They see more late-night revelers heading home than fellow runners, and sometimes they can still hear the parties going.
“It’s sort of neat when you get out that early,” Evans said. “You get to go to places where you don’t always go.”
While their runs serve as escapes from work demands, Evans and Nemzer have hashed out race details before the sun rises: how to map out the Boston Athletic Association 10k to minimize traffic, or sharing safety and operations information ahead of the 2014 Boston Marathon to make sure the city and the BAA were on the same page.
Evans finished the 2013 Boston Marathon before the bombs went off, and recalled that his runs with Nemzer helped him cope with the stress that followed. Evans was in a whirlpool at an athletic club in South Boston when he received a call about the bombs.
“I think I owe a lot of how I handled it to being able to get out and run on those mornings,” said Evans, who was a police superintendent at the time.
Still, the bombing comes back to him whenever he runs down Boylston Street, whether it’s crossing the finish line or passing Whiskey’s Steakhouse, where cameras captured the Marathon bombers on film.
Although Boston is Evans’s favorite marathon, he skipped it this year to focus on security preparations after the terrorist attacks in Brussels in March.
“I was disappointed, but my job is more important than my running is,” Evans said. “The safety of the city comes first.”
Evans unplugs during his morning runs, but many recognize his familiar face and thin frame and he often finds himself fielding questions — and complaints —
He might encounter even more people if they were awake at that hour, he said.
“Too early,” he muses.
So far, Evans has been lucky: He hasn’t had to intervene in anything serious on his runs, although he did warn a couple of people away from homes they seemed to be inspecting a bit too closely.
But Evans looks like any other early-rising runner, and mostly he and Nemzer just give directions.
Nemzer, who has run about 130 marathons, is planning to drive with Evans to the Maine marathon Sunday and run the second half with him. Then, it’s back to their routine of early-morning miles. Until the next race day.
“It’s a moment of tranquility,” said Nemzer. “Everybody needs those moments. Nobody banging on the door.”
Evan Allen can be reached at evan.allen@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @evanmallen.