I think I first heard this Tom Petty song while watching MTV back in the day. I liked it but then didn’t think much more about it.

Fast forward a few years, I was running in one of my first ever cross country races. As I came to the end of the first mile out of five, my adrenaline from the start had about worn off and pain from the exertion was starting to register. As the course passed over a road and a spectator was shouting to pep up another runner, I confronted a decision: how hard should I run the remaining four miles? On one hand, I felt the allure to take things somewhat easy and be in control of the pain ahead; on the other, I could push as best I could, but I was daunted by the unknown greater pain that would involve. While on the edge of deciding, from out of nowhere this song came into my head. Hearing the words, “I won’t back down…,” sparked something in me and I moved forward thinking, “Yeah, I don’t want to back down!” 

Looking back, I remember this race as one of my most challenging, perhaps being so because it was one of my first. As I remember, for much of the remaining four miles, I felt I was barely hanging on to not backing down to doubt, fear, and pain. I particularly remember, for a long isolated stretch, finding myself dueling with one other runner and not knowing how things would unfold. When I reached the finish line, many runners had already come in ahead of me, but when I looked at the clock I was surprised to see I beat a time by two seconds that I had dreamt of breaking, one which I wasn’t sure I could ever break. Those two seconds made me think that every moment of pushing in that race had mattered: had I backed off in any of them, I probably wouldn’t have broken that time that day. 

For that whole experience, I’ve since appreciated this song. Over the years, it has come to resonate with me even more and it feels like it has been a personal anthem. I believe Petty wrote it out of his experience of being in a legal battle where he was willing to go bankrupt. I also read how he said he wasn’t sure about releasing it and that it may never have seen the light of day:

That song frightened me when I wrote it. I didn’t embrace it at all. It’s so obvious. I thought it wasn’t that good because it was so naked. So I had a lot of second thoughts about recording that song. But everyone around me liked the song and said it was really good and it turns out everyone was right—more people connect to that song than anything I ever wrote. I’ve had so many people tell me that it helped them through this or it helped them through that. I’m still continually amazed about the power a little 3-minute song has.

I’ll add myself to those people this song has helped. 

Also, this is my favorite version he did.