Only on the web version of Garmin Connect is this necessary, and it’s pointless! A private event should absolutely be able to have a private course. Moreover, editing the event in the iOS Garmin Connect app, a private course can be added and saved. So this isn’t a backend issue, but just the web app being annoying. Please fix this!
Omg it took me five months to get back to this. So I double-checked, and it’s still broken for me. I pinned a course in Ride With GPS which syncs to Garmin as a private course (and it cannot be made public without duplicating it). In the iOS Garmin Connect App, I can edit my private race event and add the course…but in the website that change isn’t reflected and it can’t be added from the “edit event” menu. Strangely enough, from the private course I can click “add to event” and do it that way. But either way I can’t set a goal time. Here’s some screenshots:
Guess it's because of import. For manually created private course - it works.
So try if it works for you too with a manual one. If yes, then probably there is some bug with imported ones.
I had a similar issue with an imported course, and this got me in the right place to fix things. There were actually two issues in the course settings. First the public/private has to match the public/private setting of the event, which was easy as you get an error (not very prominent). The second setting is that for the imported course, the course type was blank, and needed to be set to (in this case) running to match my event. Between the two things, that fixed the issue.
Thanks @BunBun!
