Brooks Ravena is a new enough shoe to us here in Amphibian King. We've been selling it's older brother the Brooks Adrenaline for close to 10 years and it's been a great shoe for us. Customers love it but the Ravena we've only had for the last 2 years. In that time it's built up a bit of a customer base. Brooks class it as more of a guidance shoe that an out and out Support shoe the way the Adrenaline would be.
I've tried plenty of Brooks shoes in my time mainly their support ones as I tend to need a support shoe especially for the longer runs. This was my first time trying something new for the Dublin half marathon 2015. I got them about 2 weeks before the half and started to break them in on the shorter runs. I had been suffering a bit with a tight right calf and since moving over to the Ravena with the higher drop it seems to have cleared up a good bit. It wasn't something that was stopping me from training but I could just feel it on the runs. I'm trying to improve my technique but at the moment I still heel strike (God feel like i'm at an AA meeting). Two weeks into it and the tight calf has cleared up, I can't be 100% sure it was the shoes as I was doing a lot more foam rolling also but I won't be going back into the lower drop shoes for a while.
So ran the Dublin half marathon on Saturday with no problems (other than a slow time!!). I found them a bit lighter than what i'm used to, you could certainly feel the higher heel drop but I was happy with that. We have noticed more people coming in store and having tight calfs or Achilles tendon. Not always but sometimes we're finding some of the brands with a higher heel to toe differential is helping them recover.
Damian.