Zach Berman felt he was just about over his latest bout of jet lag. No matter how much sleep he got on a flight, no matter how diligent he was about taking his melatonin supplements, which he was convinced helped, and not sleeping during daylight on his return to Colorado, he was always knocked off center a little for a few days after flying home.

He had been back in Boulder by the time the first stage of the Giro d’Italia—a short time trial—was held on Saturday. The next day there was a longer stage, more than two hundred kilometers. Berman followed the team’s progress on the Internet. He was pleased to see the Azerbaijani team’s riders had performed decently without being embarrassingly bad or improbably good. Although Berman had no control over the team leader’s performance, he was pleased to see he lay in thirtieth place overall; his Chinese riders finished each day in the middle of the peloton, the main group of supporting riders, which was just as it should be. Berman was looking forward to being back in Milan on the twenty-seventh for the end of the race, even if he had to travel there via China. But the long trip would be well worth it if the latest training results were replicated over the course of the next couple of weeks.

On Sunday Berman had forced himself to pay another painful visit to his mother at the Valley Springs Assisted Living home in Louisville. Each time he went, he thought he detected a tangible decline in his mother’s capabilities. On this occasion, she was just a little more belligerent toward him, and just a little less capable of completing a coherent sentence. The inexorable decay was frightening, not for his mother, as he had given up any hope of stemming her disease, but for himself.

He felt his going there was like those juvenile-offender programs in which at-risk teens are sent to a hard adult jail in the hope that they’ll be scared straight. Except Berman was trying to make sure he worked even harder to make sure his Nano team had the funds to make progress with the science. His ability to comprehend the technical aspects of the program had long ago been left behind by the advances his scientists were making, but he kept on top of it the best he could. What Berman could do was ensure he secured the money.