Years ago, I was watching The West Wing and saw something I couldn’t unsee: a map of the world different and turned upside down.

It’s called the Gall-Peters Projection map. The familiar Mercator map we all saw in childhood classrooms—which was designed for navigation and makes compass directions easy to follow—distorts the size of landmasses, making regions like Europe, Greenland, and North America appear larger than they really are. The Gall-Peters projection, on the other hand, preserves the relative size of continents more accurately, though it distorts their shapes.

But what struck me most was the version of the map that was flipped vertically. Antarctica sat at the top. South America loomed above North America. Africa dominated the center. Why? Well—why not?

Same Earth. Totally different perspective.

We’re so used to thinking “North is up” that flipping it feels disorienting—even wrong. But it isn’t wrong. It’s just different. The map isn’t lying—it’s just reminding us how much our view is shaped by our assumptions.

I think about that sometimes when it comes to training. If you’ve been following the same plan for a while—with the same coach or the same workouts week after week—it might be time to flip your map.

Not overhaul everything. Just change the angle. Talk to a different runner about their routine. Try a new long run route. Swap in a different workout. Sometimes a small shift in how you see the problem is all it takes to unlock progress.

Same training. New perspective.