An elevator in Payne Whitney Gym can hold up to 2,500 pounds. That’s more than a ton of weight. That’s about three grizzly bears. Ten NFL linebackers could ride that elevator without a problem, if they could all fit inside at once.

Surprisingly, the elevator will still run if it’s overloaded. An alarm rings in warning, but it sounds the same as the alarm that goes off when the elevator door has stood open for too long. So how do you really know?

But when I stepped on an overloaded PWG elevator, I knew. We all knew. There weren’t any linebackers or grizzly bears with me. I wasn’t with construction workers trying to bring scaffolding up to the roof. I wasn’t even carrying much myself. I probably could have taken the stairs. But after varsity swim practice ends at 6 p.m., our legs are tired and we want to avoid the cold stairwells of PWG. My teammates and I always take the elevator. Just usually not the same one.

Shivering in our speedos and still dripping water, we waited for an elevator to reach the third floor. Usually the team trickles out from the pool in groups, but that day we had all gathered for a meeting and left at the same time. When a door finally opened, everyone rushed inside until the last person said, “Screw it,” and pushed his way in. People protested as the alarm rang, but when the door shut it stopped. I stood in the back corner, pressed against the wall.

That’s when we counted. We’d fit 20 people in that five-by-five foot space. It wasn’t comfortable and it wasn’t safe. But it was worth it if we didn’t have to wait for another elevator to show up.

Let’s say the average guy on the swim team weighs 165 pounds, which is a conservative estimate. That means we had shoved 3,300 pounds in there. We didn’t just hit the 2,500 pound limit; we didn’t go over it by a few hundred; we annihilated it. Three flights of stairs was just too much.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if we got stuck?”

“Shut up.”

“Guys let’s all jump on the count of three! One, two…”

“NO!”

But they jumped. Who knows how with everyone packed so tight. I couldn’t see because I’m short and because my nose touched the back of the person standing in front of me. Instead I listened, but I didn’t hear the door open. After an awkward moment, someone realized we had to press the call button. A woman answered and asked where we were stuck and how many people were in the elevator. We hesitated before we told her ten, because we worried that maybe they wouldn’t come get us out if we told them that we’d actually fit twice as many.

So with the fire department on its way, we started to wonder what our chances were. If we’d make it. Someone said that we might run out of oxygen. But then we remembered that we were in an elevator, not a collapsed mine, so that probably wouldn’t be an issue. People started blaming those who jumped, because apparently we assumed that the weight limit was just a suggestion. We wondered what the person opening the door would think. And then someone asked if whoever answered our intercom call was still listening.

“Yeah, we’re still here… and we record everything,” she responded.

After ten minutes, the fire department arrived. They politely knocked on the elevator door to see if anyone was there. We calmly replied, yes, and that we would like to be let out. They pried the door open enough for one person to leave. Normally when you exit an elevator, the floor of the elevator lines up with the floor outside. But when you jump, the floor of the elevator drops about two extra feet, so the outside floor comes to about your waist level. At least we’d already been close to the basement when we jumped. Twenty people climbed up and filed out, one by one, past four firemen. They’d come prepared in full gear with helmets; we were armed with our speedos. As we shuffled out, we thanked them and hurried down the hall. They just stared at us blankly, not saying a word. That is, until the fire marshal spoke to the director of PWG, who then spoke to our coach.

He was conflicted. On the one hand, he had to punish us. “While they [the firemen] are here busting your dumb asses out of the elevator, they potentially could not be saving lives that are in desperate need,” he explained in a semi-baffling email later that night. In the end, we were banned, shamefully, from the elevator for the rest of the semester. I will never understand how the women’s team, whose coach never allows them to use the elevators, tackles those three flights of stairs every day.

If we were caught taking the elevator, we would have to do 3,000 yards of butterfly — 120 laps — without stopping. That’s a rough punishment. If you don’t believe me, take the elevator to the third floor pool, and give it a shot.

-Graphics by Kai Takahashi