Meet The French Internet’s Best Friend, Océane Andréa
Océane Cardoso found success by ignoring trends and doing her own thing. After running the New York Marathon, she’s trying to find new ways to challenge herself.
If you happen to wander to the fitness side of the internet, you’ll probably find two main archetypes: the “pink Pilates princess” with the lavish lifestyle and perfect body, or the alpha-male type hashtag “locking in” for his “winter arc.” Reductive? Sure. Accurate? Probably. But somewhere in a corner of the francophone internet, lies a little haven of authentic self-improvement.
Océane Cardoso, known as Océane Andréa, is a 23-year-old French woman who began her social media journey on YouTube in early 2021. She started out by posting home workout videos with no particular goal in mind. Her fan base took off on TikTok and Instagram a few years later, when she started posting running vlogs and personal content. In an online world ruled by fleeting trends, audiences found a pleasant surprise in her idiosyncratic and down-to-earth style.
A typical video will start out like this: Cardoso in front of the camera, smiling. Long brown hair, minimal makeup. She’s either wearing fitness gear, or a slouchy knit sweater and chunky glasses.
Her content is mainly running-focused, but also about her daily life (books, leisure, skin care and New York) Her screen presence is cheerful, and her voice sounds like that of a friend you’re meeting up with at a café after a long day.
Although it’s at the heart of her career, Cardoso did not become passionate about fitness until after high school. Growing up, she would trail after her mom on the rare times she would go with her on a run; now, she has run two major marathons. Her love affair with running really started during her exchange semester at UC Berkeley in 2022, where the weather is so nice that there’s no good reason not to lace up your sneakers and take in the sunshine.
“I was very, very, slow. I was terrible,” Cardoso said. “I didn’t care about the distances. In 2022, nobody talked about running online, so you had no comparison to anyone. I just did it because I enjoyed it.”
She started documenting her experience with running in a no-frills way, acknowledging that sometimes waking up to train is daunting and sometimes you lose motivation completely. Cardoso’s authentic, unvarnished way of tackling challenges boosted her audience quickly. She provided a fresh voice which offered a new way of influencing, a kind untainted by trends. Instead of making it seem easy, she’s not scared to address her struggles. This while also having the determination to see things through, which many find inspiring and a genuine reflection of the human experience.
“Nothing stops her. When she has an idea, she just runs with it. I think that’s her secret: not limiting herself, ’” her sister Marina said.
After traveling around Europe running half-marathons, Cardoso enrolled in graduate school at New York University where she is studying sports business. She moved to the United States in the summer of 2024, a childhood dream come true.
That fall, Cardoso ran in Central Park, studied in Bobst and swam at the Paulson Center pool. One crisp November day, wanting to step out of routine, she decided to challenge herself to something entirely new: fiction writing.
With no prior experience, she started her first book, a coming-of-age novel, through a challenge called “National Novel Writing Month.” Cardoso brought the discipline of being an athlete to her writing, diligently churning out pages every day. She spent hours in the Rose Main Reading Room at the New York Public Library, taking her camera along. She shared her excitement and her doubts online.
“I love challenges like these. Even if I don’t know if I’m going to succeed, even if I won’t be able to complete 50,000 words in a month, it’ll still be more words than I’ve ever written before. And I’ve always loved to write,” Cardoso shared on YouTube.
During finals week at NYU, she pulled a heavily caffeinated all-nighter in Bobst Library to finish her book before going home for winter break. Bleary-eyed and emotional, she stood in the lower level printing room at 4 a.m. as her first manuscript whirred into existence. After many hours of powering through the last few legs of her novel, she quietly crossed the finish line.
“In writing, just like running, you cannot expect to have any results fast, and you have to be very patient,” she said.
She returned home for winter break and showed the hard-earned stack of pages to her parents.
“We were on the couch, and she shows us this manuscript and says, ‘Mom, Dad, I wrote a book.’ First we didn't understand, and then we burst out laughing and congratulated her. I think I told her, ‘What can’t you do?’” said her mom, Rosa.
Now, Cardoso is in the process of self-editing her book–a process she’s described online as difficult and humbling. Her Instagram stories poke fun, captioned with things like “Dear spirit of Jane Austen, should I start this book over or keep editing it?” She is determined to edit and publish this book completely by herself, and she’s taking her viewers along for this new kind of endurance test. In one video, she compared running a 5K to writing 5,000 words.
Cardoso is like a friend young women can carry around in their pocket and catch up with every time they open Instagram or TikTok– always up to something, doing big things and keeping it real. She made a Women’s Day video where she talked openly about her past insecurities, and celebrated her progress. She showed her followers the ins and outs of a semi-marathon morning routine. On YouTube, she addresses the camera casually, while doing dishes or on a teary Uber ride home. Through her social media, she appears as a force of nature that is not afraid to sit down for a coffee break and a chat.