Ugh. Over two months before that fun ride down the American River Bike trail. Kind of hard to connect dots that way and compare training "feel". We rode about 60 miles total so we can still do a decent distance, so long as we are not time pressured (of course 2+ flat tires do not help ones time...).
However we have added dual Garmin Edge 510's so we have more data. The interesting part was comparing heart rates now that we both have HRMs. During the ride she seemed to be 20-25 BPM lower and the end of ride data backed this up:
Her average 112 against a target max of 156 or 72%.
My average 138 against a target max of 172 or 80%.
The part that really got her attention though was that I got credit for 2323 calories while she only got credit for 866 on the same ride (she is very much a calorie counter). I have noted in prior HRM use that the math for calorie counts is very strongly affected by HR with higher BPM feeding into a non-linear increase in calorie count. So we will see how things play out on the next ride and if this new data motivates a change.