I Kept a Dressage Journal for Years. It Barely Helped. Here’s What Was Missing.
I have journaled for years.
It started as notes scattered everywhere. Then something more organized, in a notebook of its own. Then an actual purpose-built dressage journal.
So when I started working with a mental skills coach and her first question was do you journal?, I was thrilled to say of course I do. I had the notebooks to prove it.
What I didn’t have was any real understanding of why I was doing it. The lines were free-form and I filled them with impressions. And there were goals, because of course there were goals, but most of mine were really just notations of hope. Things I wanted to be true by summer or in a couple of years, or a random focus for the day or week.
I scanned the journals regularly, flipping through the pages looking for something useful, and I’d find: oh yeah, here’s another entry about my problem with the changes. Or: wasn’t Pony naughty that day. Or: why is this 3 week section blank? What happened then?
The flipping was usually driven by an actual question. What was that great exercise Martin had me do? What was it Kate told me about the timing for the changes? And I would turn pages and either fail to find the lesson at all, or find it and discover that past-me hadn’t had the fortitude to write down the exercise. Just really good! Or breakthrough! No substance. A verdict with no evidence attached.
Eventually I decided to up my game so I created a Google Form. It was a big improvement: the entries were structured and consistent, I could complete the form quickly at the barn and I knew I would be able to easily search my data afterward. In the back of my mind, I was also thinking about the opportunity to analyze the data. It didn’t go as planned. I built cross-tabs and stared at the output. After enough of them, each thoroughly scrutinized, I concluded the data was simply useless.
Then I fed it to AI, and discovered it had never been useless at all. I just had no way to make sense of it.
The two failures of a dressage journal
Looking back, my journals failed in two distinct ways, and they need different fixes.
The first failure was capture. In my freeform journaling days, I was writing down my reactions instead of the content. Breakthrough! records that something happened. It does not record what happened. Six months later, seeing a reaction is worthless. The thing I actually needed — Martin’s exercise, Kate’s timing cue — was never written down at all. I didn’t have the structure or guidance to capture it.
The second failure was the analysis. Even when I had more structured data, I still couldn’t see anything. And if you want to actually use the data, the fix is not more discipline, nor a better notebook. You need a tool. Not because you lack skill, but because you cannot hold six months of riding data in your head, compare it against itself, and notice that a particular pattern appears eleven times. Nobody can.
So here’s the rub: journaling without analysis is expensive record-keeping. The research on athlete reflection backs it up. Most athletes stay at the evaluative level, writing down whether a session was good or bad, and never reach the analytical level, where lasting change happens.
I had years of evidence that I had collected and no way to make sense of it.
Why the cross-tabs didn’t work
I assumed that once I collected structured data, the analysis would be straightforward. Rate the ride, tag the movements, chart the trend. But the numbers were only part of the data and they turned out to be the least interesting thing I had collected. The most valuable material was in the narrative. What I wrote about how the contact felt on the left rein, what my trainer said in the last five minutes, why I stopped early after a difficult morning.
That content is not cross-tabbable. It’s prose, it’s inconsistent, it’s written in my own private shorthand, and I hadn’t found a tool that could read across a hundred entries of it and tell me what kept appearing. That is, until I fed my data to AI. Language and volume summary is exactly what the current generation of AI is good at.
What I found when I fed my data to AI
Three things, and they map directly onto what was broken.
It found the instruction I’d forgotten. Concepts my coaches had taught me, sitting in my own entries, that I had lost entirely. Reading that list was humbling.
It found patterns I could not have seen from inside. How differently I rode my two horses, and what I was bringing to each of them that had nothing to do with the horse. That pattern was present across dozens of entries. It was invisible in any single one.
It recognized the struggle. Not sympathetically. Accurately. It reflected back the actual difficulty of what adult amateurs are attempting without minimizing it and without feeling sorry for me.
What I’d tell my earlier self about journaling
If you want to keep a dressage journal that eventually pays you back, a few things matter more than I understood at the time.
Write the content, not the verdict. Breakthrough! is worthless to the future you. What your trainer actually said, in her words, and what the exercise actually was, is worth a great deal. If you write nothing else, write the exercise.
Do it while you untack. Not later in the evening, not tomorrow. The gap between the ride and the record is where the detail dies. Two to five minutes on your phone at the barn beats twenty thoughtful minutes three days later, every time. Voice input counts.
Reconstruct before you rate. Finishing the sentence if someone had filmed this ride, they would have seen… before you score anything is a different mental act than scoring. It forces you to build the session’s actual shape from memory, and over time it narrows the gap between what you felt and what was happening.
Set process goals, not hopes. This was a big error and I made it for years. Get the changes clean by August is a hope. Wait to feel the swing before I ask is a process goal, it’s inside your control, and the sport psychology evidence for it is strong: process goals improve both self-efficacy and anxiety control in ways that outcome goals don’t. Three at most, because that’s what you can actually hold in the saddle.
Address all the aspects. In my freeform journaling, I wrote about reactions and techniques, because those were easy for me to think about. The things I skipped, like feel and obstacles, were, predictably, the ones I most needed to consider.
Make sure something reads it back. This is the one I couldn’t solve on my own with any notebook, any form, or any spreadsheet and if you don’t have it, you have data and nothing else.
Where this ended up
Everything above became Your Dressage Journey, because after enough years of flipping through pages looking for Martin’s exercise, I wanted the thing to exist.
It’s a structured capture that takes a few minutes at the barn, a weekly reflection that goes deeper, and then the part I could never do myself: four coaching voices analyzing the same data through different lenses, a Journey Map that makes the arc visible, and physical and mental work built from what your own entries actually show. It tracks your horse alongside you, because two athletes show up for every ride and most journals only ever record one.
If you’re curious about the reasoning underneath the design, the research page lays out the evidence for every choice, including where the science is contested and where it’s missing entirely.
And if your specific problem is the one I had — the lesson that evaporates before you can write it down — Your Dressage Lessons takes your lesson audio and turns it into a summary you can keep. Transcription is free and there’s no account to make. Record next week’s lesson and see what you’ve been losing.
You can also try a free First Glimpse and see what your own riding looks like from the outside.
I still have the notebooks. I’m fond of them. I just don’t ask them questions anymore.