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November 1, 2026

Your route, straight to your Garmin watch

Connect your Garmin Connect™ account and send a saved route to Garmin Connect™ in one step, including drinking water points along the way. On your next sync, it's on your watch.

Your route on your Garmin: a runner in the park holds her phone and checks her watch

Mapped out a great route in the route planner? Until now, you downloaded it as a GPX file and imported it into your watch's app yourself. If you've connected your Garmin Connect™ account, it now takes one step: send the route straight to Garmin Connect™, and on your next sync, it's on your watch.

How to send a route to your watch

Open the … menu of a saved route and choose Send to Garmin Connect™. You'll find that menu in three places:

on the day card in your plan, for a workout with a linked route;
on the share page of your own route;
in the workspace where you link a route to a workout.

The route shows up in Garmin Connect™ as a course. Once your watch syncs, you'll find it under Navigation > Courses.

What comes along

A name you'll recognize. In Garmin Connect™, your route is called "RC · " followed by the name you gave it in RunCulture, so it's easy to spot among your other courses.
Drinking water. Drinking water points within 50 meters (about 160 feet) of your route come along as water points. We get them from OpenStreetMap.
The right activity type. If your route is mostly unpaved, it goes to Garmin Connect™ as trail running. Otherwise, it's set to running.

Garmin Connect™ calculates the turn prompts for your route itself. If your watch doesn't have maps, like the Forerunner 265, you'll see the route line on your screen, and your watch alerts you when you go off course.

Changed your route? The course follows

When you change the name or the line of a route that's already in Garmin Connect™, we update that same course, so you won't end up with duplicates. If you delete a route in RunCulture, the course stays in Garmin Connect™. You can remove it there yourself when you no longer need it.

Routes that travel with your workouts

If you sync your plan with Garmin Connect™, any route linked to a workout in the next 14 days can go along automatically as a course.

To set this up, click the Active plan · Sync with Garmin Connect™ badge at the top of your plan page. In the Active plan pop-up that opens, turn Include linked routes on or off. You'll see that option as soon as Sync with Garmin Connect™ is on. To learn how syncing your plan works, read RunCulture now works with Garmin Connect™.

Getting started

Connect your Garmin Connect™ account from your profile, under Connected apps. For more about the connection and what happens to your data, read RunCulture now works with Garmin Connect™. Seeing a message that the ‘Course Import’ permission is turned off? Turn it on for RunCulture in Garmin Connect™ and try again.

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