How to Plan a Route and Navigate It on Your Garmin

Drawing a route at a desk and following it on a bike computer involves three artifacts: the planner where you draw it, a GPX file as the hand-off, and a course on the device. Understanding that chain is the whole skill — each step has exactly one thing that can go wrong.

Step 1: Draw the route in a planner

You do not need to commit to one ecosystem to plan a route. The mainstream options:

• Strava's route builder — heatmap-informed, popular, requires a subscription to unlock its routing.
• Komoot, RideWithGPS, cycle.travel — all export GPX freely; each has strengths (surface handling, cue sheets, wind-aware planning).
• OpenStreetMap-based planners — the underlying map data most of these route over anyway.

Whatever you use, let the planner snap the route to roads and paths. A route drawn as straight lines between waypoints navigates terribly on a device, because there is no line for it to follow between the dots. Dense, road-following tracks are what turn-by-turn guidance is built from.

Step 2: Export the GPX

Export the route as a GPX track. This is the universal hand-off format — every planner, every mapping site, and every device family reads it. Keep this file; it is the version of the route that outlives any device or platform. (Format background: GPX vs FIT vs TCX)

Before sending it anywhere, look at it once in a GPX viewer. You are checking for the classics: a wrong turn forced by a one-way street, a segment where the route doubles back on itself, a ferry crossing the planner treated as a bridge. Thirty seconds of looking beats an hour of wrong turning.

Step 3: Get it onto the device

Two paths, both legitimate:

Via Garmin Connect. Import the GPX as a course (Training → Courses → Import), and sync. Connect converts it for you. This is the zero-effort path, and it works — the trade-off is that the conversion is opaque; if the result navigates oddly, there is nothing to tune.

As a FIT course file. Convert the GPX yourself with GPX to FIT and you control what the device receives: a FIT course, the format Garmin's own software uses internally. Copy it to the Garmin/Courses/ folder over USB (or the equivalent sync folder for your device) and it appears alongside your other courses. Wahoo ELEMNT units take the same file — FIT courses are interoperable, not brand-locked.

For a route that matters — an event, a day in unfamiliar mountains — the second path is worth the extra minute.

What actually goes wrong in the field

Almost every navigation disappointment traces to one of three causes:

1. A sparse track. Waypoint-to-waypoint routes with long straight gaps leave the device guessing. Fix at the source: re-export a dense track from a routing planner.
2. Recalculation drift. When a device recalculate a course — after you miss a turn, or if its map differs from the planner's — it follows its map, not your line. A course that follows roads closely recalculates gracefully; a hand-drawn line fights the device the whole way.
3. The wrong file. A GPX track of a recorded activity (with timestamps and heart rate) used as a course, or a TCX where a FIT was expected. If a device refuses the file or shows it oddly, run it through the right converter — GPX to FIT for courses, TCX to FIT for legacy files — and try again.

The workflow, compressed

Plan in whatever tool you like. Export GPX. Eyeball it in a viewer. Convert to a FIT course with GPX to FIT, drop it in Courses, ride. The whole loop is five minutes, and every step uses open formats you keep — the route is yours, not the planner's.

That last point is not sentimental. Planners come and go, subscriptions lapse, and platforms shut down. The GPX in your routes folder is the one version of the route that will still open in ten years — on this site's viewer, among many others, without an account or an upload.