Mind-blowing surprise is all around you, if you stay open to it. This lesson was reiterated to me last week.    

I had, just before Valentine’s Day, begun the South Beach Diet as par of my ongoing quest to drop pounds, firm up and live longer. Nine pounds melted off me in nine days, but that’s not the revelation.

To get to the real revelation, we have to go back almost 25 years.    

A few weeks before my 16th birthday, a minor head injury altered my life significantly. Bad hangover, long story. What’s important to know for these purposes is that first there was hospitalization, then a cane and forever after a very slight limp on the left side of my body. The limp was only really visible only when I drank to excess. But an imbalance always lingered, out of sight but never out of mind. Who could set aside a deep and throbbing lower-body tension that resulted from constant compensation?   

Flash forward to the start of last month.

After putting on more than a few holiday pounds, I eliminated sugar and carbs from my diet for two weeks. The system shock was, at first, awful like withdrawal. No one would deny the physical results of this nutrition adjustment though. The drop in weight took pressure off my hips, knees and ankles. Things were feeling pretty good — to a point. I still had nagging pain in my lower left leg. It seemed an escapable fact of aging and that early youthful accident. Dull and annoying, yet endurable.  

My fiancée, who was also doing South Beach, gifted me with a combination Thai/Swedish massage last Monday. Twenty-four hours later I strolled over to hole in the wall called “Tranquility,” stripped to my drawers. And here’s where the revelation kicks in.

Angel, a petite Asian woman, asked me onto my belly and began to work a knot of tissue in my ankle — to the brink of intolerable pain. The room we occupied was dark. Soft and airy music lilted. Angel pushed and Angel squeezed, hard. Sounds came out of me that I could not control.    

“Too much?”

“Not at all,” I answered, even though she was all but kissing my threshold’s limit. Talking was difficult, but damned if the ankle didn’t feel like a new, younger person’s ankle by the next time I visited the parlor, a few days later. Angel started this session by rubbing far into the back of my calf.    

“You have a lot of tension in this leg,” she said. The masseuse began to press those powerful fingers all the way up the extremity, stopping just below my booty. She spent a solid 10 minutes kneading this stretch of flesh, unleashing a torrent of moans from me. If I weren’t in the middle of being transported from another, more enfeebled self, my guttural cries would have been embarrassing. In the Tranquility lobby it had to sound like I was coming, again and again.

“You have tension all through this tendon,” Angel said. She expressed confusion because, overall, my legs are very strong. Next, Angel climbed onto the table. She began to walk up and down that leg. Angel used an aluminum walker to support herself and dug into the tendo with her toes.

“Better this way,” she said. “I go deeper this way.”

I moaned still more and a warm, soft release floated from the tendon to my leg’s surface. When the masseuse climbed down, she stretched out my thighs and finished the all-but-superflous upper-body work.

When I stood up to dress I hardly recognized the feeling of being upright. For literally the first time in as long as I can remember there was no discomfort. The bad feeling was something I was accustomed to. Its absence now was glaring.

“Come back three, four times,” the masseuse said, “tension be all gone.”

She won’t have to tell me twice, as I feel born again. On Sunday night, I found myself running down Venice Boulevard, despite having ridden a stationary bike for 11 miles and spent much of the afternoon walking up and down the boardwalk. There was no need to run. It was just hard not to, considering the gift of new gams.

Now it’s obvious to me that there are three crucial components to fitness. There’s exercise and nutrition — the ones everyone hypes — but also therapeutic massage. We put so much wear and tear on these bodies of ours that, over time, it’s easy to be deaf to their cries for comfort. Angel talked to my body last week, and the impact of our conversation was comparable to explosive sex or pure hallucinogens. Her massage is one of the most positively shocking experiences of my adult life.

Donnell Alexander is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Sports & Fitness. He posts Mondays and Thursdays.