Aged 59, married and father of two boys aged 33 and 30, Christian Gousseau has been from Martillac for around twenty years. This former soldier has 37 years of service in the army, including around twenty in the paratrooper and mountain infantry combat units. In this context, he accomplished “psychologically traumatic missions,” he says.
Resilience through sport
Christian Gousseau has always been sporty and, at the age of 40, he decided to participate in the La Rochelle marathon, encouraged by Catherine, his wife. He turned to this sport in order to “find therapy and an outlet for these invisible wounds”, as we modestly call the psychological disorders linked to military missions as delicate as they are difficult.
It was in 2017, after reconnecting with French marathons, that Christian Gousseau discovered the World Marathon Majors (WMM), an international competition created in 2006, which brings together the major annual marathon races, Tokyo, London, Boston, Berlin, Chicago and New York. He therefore took on a new challenge: running these six marathons to help with his reconstruction.
So here he is in New York in 2017, then in Tokyo, Chicago, London and Berlin in the following years, with times between 4h01m and 3h23m, which does not prevent him from participating in other events: six days of the Marathon des Sables in Morocco in 2022, a trail for war wounded in Scotland, in 2023, from where he returns as a gold medalist and a marathon in Washington as a pusher for an injured soldier.
Holder of five WMM medals, it remains for Christian Gousseau to grab the 6the to his record by running the legendary Boston Marathon, created in 1897, in the spring of 2025. He will also have the Six Star medal, which will not prevent him from continuing the competitions that have helped him, in addition to his family , to regain a certain well-being step by step.
