We did not invent this; here is the logo for Pat Conroy’s new gym

New York Times bestselling novelist Pat Conroy is embracing a healthier lifestyle, and he wants you to be there at his side. That’s why he’s opening a gym in Port Royal, South Carolina.

“There is nothing on my resume that suggests I’ll be successful in this unusual endeavor,” Conroy writes, but he’d still like to write “four or five” more books in his lifetime and doesn’t want to shorten his life due to his “own bad habits.” He’s renounced drinking, hired a neighbor nutritionist, and taken up exercise.

File this one under “oddball things bestselling authors do as they get older”: Conroy’s opening the gym with his trainer from the local YMCA, Mina Truong. In the Beauford Gazette, Erin Moody reports:

“I was training my clients and he said, ‘Do you have any openings?'” Truong recalled. “I was thinking, ‘He doesn’t know me. Why is he approaching me?’ But my clients were like, ‘Oh, Mina, you have to go and talk to the gentleman.'”

Conroy pressed his number into her hand, and Truong went back to her clients.

She worked with him for a while, then he disappeared for a year or so. He randomly appeared at the Y one day after hearing Truong had surgery.

This time, he gave her a card. At home later that night, she cried when her son read the supportive note.

“I thought, ‘This gentleman is crazy.’ He is so famous, but he did that,” she said.

Conroy injured his back during a book tour (on his book tour?) and took a year off from training, but he’s back in it, and wants to be sure his trainer has a small studio so they can continue to meet. In a self-deprecating joke on his website, he said he wouldn’t appear in any advertisements for the gym.

Will he write the inspirational posters for the walls? Put together a couple of signature Conroy workout mixes? We’d be interested to see the list. There are stranger ways for a bestselling author to invest, sure, but this is a memorable one.