#reading tihiwmr

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Being Marc Márquez : This Is How I Win My Race.

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A collection of fully unhinged quotes from Chapter 8 of Being Marquez : This is How I Win My Race :

“Of course there are a few crashes in my life I would rather have avoided. Going beyond the limit too often at the start of the 2011 season, regularly ending up flat on my face and losing all-important points to Bradl was my decision and my mistake, so not a problem. The crash in Sepang, when we came to an impassable, dangerous spot with no warning, was bad luck. But I had been incredibly lucky that year just the race before, and in a situation I was solely responsible for screwing up.”

“When we riders see the slightest chance of being able to compete in the race, we take it. You couldn't think any other way. At least, I couldn't. I really turn into an animal that no power in the world could restrain.

If it turns out in the course of a race that I'm actually not up to it, then I can deal with that. But I wouldn't be able to sleep if I hadn't tried.

But I'm not naive either. That time, I had to be sure my humerus would hold. "Definitely," the doctors said. "We've put a titanium plate in for you." Marc the cyborg... I kind of liked that.”

“Dr Sanchez-Sotelo didn't know me or what I did for a living when he said that you can't even clean windows with an upper arm twisted through 34°. I told him I rode motorbikes, but pretty miserably at the moment.”

“In the US, they severed my humerus and rotated it outwards back into its original position. The mechanical problem which had limited my mobility and that, obviously, no amount of physiotherapy was going to cure, was now resolved. The improvement in function was noticeable immediately. If I'd wanted to drink a glass of water beforehand, I had to stretch out my entire arm. It was the same thing with eating. My mechanics really noticed it of an evening. No one wanted to sit on my right anymore because they knew they'd get my elbow in their face! I only realised how warped and screwed up the whole thing was by getting feedback from others, because if the hands are basically where they are meant to be, you don't notice how far off the rest of the arm is.”

“My character changes depending on whether I can ride a motorbike or not. I need the adrenaline. Desperately. If I don't get it, like in the winter of 2022/23, when I gave my arm all the time in the world to heal completely and made sure just to get it back to where it had been, I become completely unbearable. It ended up with my brother, Álex, telling me to go out and find a girlfriend, or do something else to keep myself busy, because I was unbearable. I was like a caged tiger.”

“Your willingness to take risks is different depending on whether you're 20 or 30. But my willingness to take maximum risk, if I have to, remains unchanged. Now I think about things more precisely when I take it to the max. I used to think my body was made for racing. Now I say if I don't look after my body, I won't be able to race. It's a small but crucial difference. Risk management is new to the Marc Marquez system.”

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Marc Marquez, This Is How I Win My Race.

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Marc Marquez talking about going to Dr. Sánchez after he got diplopia for the first time in 2011.

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“Do I regret missing out on the 2011 title? No. Stefan Bradl was a deserving world champion because he scored more Moto2 World Championship points that year than anyone else. That's all there is to it. There's no such thing as an undeserving world champion. Everyone starts the season with zero points and we tot them up at the end of the year. Did Joan Mir deserve to be the 2020 MotoGP World Champion, even though he only won one race? Of course he did! Risk management is a factor when it comes to performance, a quality unique to a complete racer. You often have to take more of a risk to win, but you also need to know when it's too much. Some riders do it better, others worse. I've been looking at one of them in the mirror every day in recent years. But for me, the extra risk worked out. I had to invest a bell of a lot, but I came out the richer for it.”

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CIRCUIT RICARDO TORMO, 10TH NOVEMBER 2013 : “And then came the highlight, at least for me. It was back on the bike and off to the parc fermé, where my crew was waiting, between the bikes of Lorenzo, who had won the race, and my friend and teammate Pedrosa. It was a very emotional moment. I could finally turn the bike off and at long last collapse into my team’s arms! At moments like those I’m a total hugger. I love collapsing into people’s arms, feeling hands patting me on the back, jumping up and down in circles together, being picked up and thrown into the air… It’s the best feeling in the whole world! I think I floated that afternoon.”

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Being Marc Márquez : This Is How I Win My Race | Sepang, 25th of October 2015

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Marc Márquez : This Is How I Win My Race

Chapter 5 : At Home

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“Amazingly, my first MotoGP test in 2012 went pretty well. That was because my Moto2 bike that year wasn’t good to ride. Yes, I did win the world championship pretty commandingly on it, but the stupid thing was rarely fun to ride.” — Marc Marquez about what’s it’s like to ride a MotoGP bike.

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Second mention of Max in Marc’s book : “In extreme situations, a father tends to side with his child and protect him. It was important that that protective shield was taken away in those early years. That strengthens your character, which you desperately need in the unforgiving world of elite sport. It was never as dramatic in my case as it was with Max Verstappen, whose father once left him on an Italian motorway after he had screwed up a race. But I have also felt I was on my own every now and again and had to learn to deal with problems, failure or pressure by myself.”

Followed by this at the end of the same page : “Driving home together from races… I like looking back on that. The mood in the car was the same whether I had won or lost. It was crucial for me as a child; my parents treated me the same no matter how the race went, whether I had won, finished second or landed flat on my face. I was always worth the same to them. That experience takes an enormous amount of pressure off a child. The mood only changed if there were technical problems because my parents would already be wondering how they would be able to afford the repairs.”

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“It seems to me that I’m getting more direct in what I say as the years pass, and maybe I overdo it sometimes. I like the totally direct, blunt way Max Verstappen communicates with his team, even though I usually don’t know his reasons for making the decisions he does and how he makes them, of course. But when he makes one, he stands by it, and everyone knows where he’s at. I think it’s necessary to distinguish between the decision itself and the way it’s communicated, and in the latter Max is absolutely brilliant and unequivocal.” — Marc Marquez talking about Max Verstappen in Being Marc Márquez : This Is How I Win My Race.

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all in rewatch - 6/∞

"I have an anecdote with Takeo [Yokoyama]. In the Malaysian tests, the first tests in 2013, I fell 4 times. I remember, he told me "with that riding style, you'll never get anywhere, you're just breaking the bike and you're not going to manage anything and you're only going to hurt yourself". And I told him "You take care of reparing the bike and if I injure myself, the doctors will take care of me"."

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“It is typical to expect an attack by a Ducati known for its top speed at the end of a long straight. You can almost bet on it making a move in the braking zone. You don’t have that option on a Honda or Yamaha at the moment, so it takes a different strategy, one where you have to keep plugging away.” — Marc with the dig at both Honda & Yamaha in his book, as he should.

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at this point I don’t know if it’s a shared custody situation or if Marc fully stole Alex’s dogs and I’m not sure of how much Alex is aware of in that new arrangement

[kingofthering]

Being Marc Márquez : This Is How I Win My Race.