Remembering David Kimani

Friends, family still shocked by runner's sudden death

David Kimani cut a spindly figure even by running standards. A bit over 6 feet 2, appearing to be all arms and legs. His close friend, University of Alabama team doctor Jeff Lubenthal, dubbed him a “heart-and-lung machine."

And why not? Kimani quickly made an impression after arriving from Kenya four years ago, racing to six NCAA track and cross country titles. His grueling workouts were legendary around Tuscaloosa, as was the warm, endearing smile.

But this wasn’t your typical Kenyan distance prodigy who grew up jogging barefoot to the village school. Kimani played soccer and volleyball, taking up running less than a year before accepting a college scholarship. By Kenya’s worldly standards, his 5,000-meter time ranked a pedestrian 28th among his countrymen, though faster than any American.

So his plan was to take up U.S. citizenship, perhaps in time to run for his adopted homeland at the world championships this summer in Paris. Definitely by the 2004 Athens Olympics. The shoe giant Nike was negotiating to get his name on a contract.

And then David Kimani, 25, dropped dead last week.

Fell off his chair in the dinning hall on the Alabama campus.

The champion’s heart quit.

Why? That’s the unsolved mystery. One minute, Kimani was the picture of life, cutting up, enjoying a good time over lunch with a couple of teammates and trainer Bernard Burroughs. The next, his heart couldn’t hit a beat.

No heroic efforts could save him. It didn’t matter that the DCH Regional Medical Center is maybe 200 yards away from where he fell. Less than an hour later, doctors could no longer put off the inevitable pronouncement -- the heart-and-lung machine was dead.

On Tuesday, Kimani was brought home and buried outside Nairobi. His American wife, Chamis, met her in-laws and said goodbye to her husband on the same trip. And continents apart, family and friends alike are left with pleasant memories -- and a gnawing sense of disbelief.

This is a death that fails to add up. Not even to the professionals. When the emergency room doctor frantically phoned his office, Dr. Lubenthal thought the worst -- that maybe his friend had been in a car accident.

Flabby, out-of-shape guys fall over dead, not world-class distance runners at a lunch table. Here you had a physician who’d listened to Kimani’s heart a couple dozen time over three years, never hearing anything even remotely abnormal. Remembering it as a fine-tuned runner’s heart, with a resting rate that clicked slowly along at 50 or so beats a minute.

“One of the first things his wife, Chamis, said to me when I got to the hospital is, ‘This is not real. Tell me he is going to get up,'" Lubenthal recalled softly. “And I couldn’t tell her he wasn’t until I could touch him.

“It was just so absolutely inconceivable, I had to touch him myself. I get bad news a lot in my job. This is an absolute shock."

Even now, nobody has a clue. The initial autopsy report failed to reveal an obvious cause of death. Still to come are results from a microscopic evaluation of his heart as well as toxicology and blood tests -- friends and doctors emphatically insist Kimani never would put ephedra or any drugs in his system -- and medical officials caution it’s possible a definitive cause of death may never be known.

It may simply be characterized as sudden cardiac death.

“In other words, people just drop dead for no reason," said Dr. Jimmy Robinson, another Alabama team physician. “Usually it is an electrical problem within the heart where the heart’s electrical wires don’t function well and you get an abnormal rhythm. If it doesn’t jump out of that abnormal rhythm the heart doesn’t pump. Then it’s not pumping blood to the brain or anywhere else, and you will die."

One possible cause could be an enlarged heart, which Robinson said is thought to have been a factor in the death of former college basketball star Hank Gathers. That hasn’t yet been addressed in the autopsy, but Kimani displayed none of the usual symptoms. He didn’t complain of dizziness or chest pain. He wasn’t easily fatigued and his performance wasn’t in decline.

In fact, the Nairobi native checked out fine during a physical exam in the fall. And just two days before he died, after being hobbled eight weeks by a fibula stress fracture, Kimani was cleared by Dr. Lubenthal to begin serious training.

What Lubenthal laughs about now is that unbeknownst to him, Kimani had already taken the liberty to train. Not only that, it sounds as if he’d run in a marathon two weeks earlier.

Word of the marathon, which the doctor is still trying to confirm, was disclosed to Lubenthal at the funeral by the doctor's own aunt, Gayle Hilburn. Kimani had boarded in her Mobile home when he first came to the U.S. and attended South Alabama as a freshman before transferring to Alabama.

“I was telling her how I had him in a boot cast, and she said, ‘You know he came down two weeks ago and ran a marathon?’" Lubenthal said, smiling. “I said, ‘What?’ But that was just David. I used to fuss with him because David would try to run through injuries.

“David has more miles on his feet than a lot of people have on their cars. He was just a fanatic about running, truly was."

Something of a statesman on and off the track, too.

Friends use words like humble, genuine and gracious in describing him -- words not uttered much today around the Alabama athletic department, which finds its head football coach embroiled in scandal. Almost 800 people turned out for the runner's funeral service in a Tuscaloosa church. Another couple thousand attended a memorial service later that day at the track stadium.

“He is the only athlete I ever took care of that I honestly would say to myself, ‘I wish I was more like David,’" said Lubenthal, himself a former Alabama baseball player.

That’s a rare gem in college athletics these days.

Mike Fish is a senior writer for SI.com.

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