Oprah Winfrey and her bestie Maria Shriver burn calories in Santa Barbara

Their friendship goes back to 1978

It’s always nice having someone to go to the gym with, and it looks like Oprah Winfrey and Maria Shriver are each other’s favorite workout buddies. The celebrity besties were spotted on Tuesday, July 23, leaving the gym in Santa Barbara looking happy and active.

Shriver, who lives in Los Angeles, is visiting Winfrey for some summertime fun. The businesswoman has a stunning mansion in Montecito known as The Promised Land. While they are long-time friends, they also might be there on business.

According to Grosby Group, after they went to the gym, they stopped at a commercial construction project in Santa Barbara that they appeared to be involved with. They spent fifteen minutes inside speaking with contractors. The friends then stopped for coffee before returning to Oprah’s Montecito estate in Maria’s Range Rover.

Oprah Winfrey’s bestie

Winfrey has called Shriver one of three people in her inner circle. In 2021, she described her relationship with Shriver as a “spiritual connection.” Their friendship actually goes back decades. They met for the first time in 1978 while working on the show People Are Talking at WJZ-TV in Baltimore. Shriver had joined the WJZ team as a producer for Evening Magazine.

“I first met her in the bathroom [while working at] WJZ-TV early in the morning. I was coming in to do the morning cut-ins, and she was doing the evening magazine and had been up all night. [She] was in the bathroom, literally, splashing water on her face, and we started a conversation,” Winfrey said on the Making Space with Hoda Kotb in 2021.  “I forever think that that was, like, a divine moment that happened because she was one of my true, grounded friendships that carried me through my entire career,” she continued.

Shriver has described it the same, calling their bond “deep, simple, low-maintenance, trustful, loyal, constant, consistent, honest, tried and true,” per People. “In a funny way, even though I had a very close relationship with my mother, I wasn’t nurtured, mothered in that way, right? And [Oprah] wasn’t mothered in her own way. But I think, in a way, we have mothered each other.”