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.

A few years later, I was running one of my first ever cross country races. As I came to the end of the first mile of five, my adrenaline had about worn off and a decision confronted me: how hard should I run the remaining four miles? On one hand, I felt the allure to hold back and stay in control of the pain ahead; on the other, I could push as best I could, but that seemed daunting. While on the edge of deciding, out of nowhere this song came into my head. Hearing the words, “I won’t back down…,” sparked something in me and I thought, “Yeah, I don’t want to back down!” 

I remember the rest of that race as one of barely hanging on to not backing down. I particularly remember a long isolated stretch with just me and one other runner dueling and our seeing if the other would crack. When I reached the finish line, I was far from first place, 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 but didn’t know if I even could. 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, or possibly any day.

From that experience, I’ve appreciated this song and it has come to resonate with me even more since. I believe Petty wrote it out of his experience of being in a legal battle where he was willing to go bankrupt if he had to. I also read 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 count myself among the people this song has helped. Also, this is my favorite version he did.