Every Saturday morning I get a jolt of excitement in anticipation of the forty-five minutes of wonder I know are soon to delight my senses, forty-five minutes of adventure, fear, and the devilish world of Steven Moffat. Doctor Who is my all time favorite TV show, a show that follows the exploits of the time travelling Doctor and his intrepid companions across the universe. The cleverest thing about this show is, of course, the time travelling part, for it acts as an easy method for the writers to put the main characters in any number of improbable situations. One week could have our heroes in a Victorian mansion haunted by ghosts, while the next could have them trying to fix the life support system of a spaceship before the oxygen runs out.
…show more content…
As silly as it sounds when broken down into its basic parts, fencing is a complex competitive sport that requires an equal amount of skill, physical ability, and tactics in order to succeed. The skill is gained mostly from experience and classes: knowing how far you can lunge, how to parry an attack, how to hold yourself so as to present as small a target as possible, and most importantly being able to translate this knowledge into movement on the strip. This conversion from the abstract to the physical leads into physical ability: reaching that extra inch forward to hit your target, having the strength to parry an attack and push it safely away, having the agility and reflexes to react to any situation and gain the upper hand. All of this would be useless of course without the tactics of when and how to use these techniques: reading your opponent to catch them as they prepare an attack, fake a lunge to misdirect their attention, aim for the head of an opponent who tends to guard low. This is what makes fencing different from other sports. It is a mind game filled with as much physical as mental effort, as much brute force as clever deception. It is no wonder that the sport has endured throughout the ages, for it is complex as chess and as exciting as a
As silly as it sounds when broken down into its basic parts, fencing is a complex competitive sport that requires an equal amount of skill, physical ability, and tactics in order to succeed. The skill is gained mostly from experience and classes: knowing how far you can lunge, how to parry an attack, how to hold yourself so as to present as small a target as possible, and most importantly being able to translate this knowledge into movement on the strip. This conversion from the abstract to the physical leads into physical ability: reaching that extra inch forward to hit your target, having the strength to parry an attack and push it safely away, having the agility and reflexes to react to any situation and gain the upper hand. All of this would be useless of course without the tactics of when and how to use these techniques: reading your opponent to catch them as they prepare an attack, fake a lunge to misdirect their attention, aim for the head of an opponent who tends to guard low. This is what makes fencing different from other sports. It is a mind game filled with as much physical as mental effort, as much brute force as clever deception. It is no wonder that the sport has endured throughout the ages, for it is complex as chess and as exciting as a