It starts with the prefix.
Ultra means beyond. Past the edge of what was considered the limit. In distance running it has a precise meaning: anything longer than a marathon. In comics it means a character built past the human ceiling. In both cases the word marks the same idea, arriving from opposite directions.
An UltraGirl is what you find on the other side of that line.
UltraGirl Unlimited is where we go looking.
Beyond the Distance
The distance is not the point. The assumption about the distance is.
A marathon is 26.2 miles. That number is not a natural boundary. It is a convention, fixed by a committee, and for most of the sport's history it was treated as the ceiling.
Ultrarunning begins where that convention ends. Any footrace longer than a marathon qualifies, and the standard distances climb from there.
The sport is not a footnote and the women in it are not a footnote either. These are documented performances by named athletes, several of them records:
- Catra Corbett
The first American woman to run one hundred miles on more than one hundred separate occasions. Holds the fastest known time on the 425-mile John Muir Trail.
- Shannon Farar-Griefer
In 2001 became the first woman to double the Badwater course on foot, 292 miles through Death Valley in July. Six official Badwater finishes and a place in the Badwater Hall of Fame. She has continued to run 100-mile races since being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
- Marisa Lizak
Set a USA 48-hour record of 243.5 miles in 2020, in her debut at that distance. Has run 100 miles in 14:50 and covered 148 miles in a 24-hour race.
- Pat DeVita
Turned 90 in 2024 with more than 150 ultramarathons behind her, and was an LA Marathon legacy runner who regularly finished first in her age division.
None of them are called UltraGirls. That is the point. The name is not a title anyone in the sport awards, and we are not claiming it on their behalf. What the two things share is the prefix, and what the prefix describes is the same in both places: the assumption that the usual limit is negotiable.
Source. The athletes above are profiled by Ultra Ladies, a women's ultrarunning coaching club and running group founded by RRCA-certified coach Nancy Shura-Dervin. Their own motto is “More Ultra, Less Lady”.
Ultra Ladies is an independent organisation with no connection to UltraGirl Unlimited. We link to them because they are the source, and because they are worth reading.
Beyond the Frame
The term in the language it was written in.
The phrase has a second life, and it is older and stranger than the comics. In August 1986, Bijutsu Techō, the most influential publication in the Japanese art world, gave its special issue the title Bijutsu no chō-shōjotachi — The Ultra Girls of Art. It profiled thirty-nine women artists working at the height of Japan's bubble economy.
The term was not invented by the magazine. It came from Chizuru Miyasako, whose 1984 book Chō-shōjo e [Toward the Ultra Girl] set out a progression:
The girl has been stripped of independence. The non-girl is alienated because she has glimpsed it. The ultra girl has the strength of spirit to stay independent, stays empathetic to others, and “rejects the masculine principle”.
Here is the part that matters to us. Miyasako did not derive the idea from painting or philosophy. She derived it from comics. Her chapter analyses Moto Hagio, the artist who remade the shōjo manga genre in the 1970s, and the character she names as an ultra girl is the Martian protagonist of Star Red, published in 1980.
The critic Eiji Ōtsuka supplied the other half of the definition in 1989: in a society organised around mass consumption, anyone who only consumes is a girl, whatever their age or gender. An ultra girl, then, is someone who has crossed over into making things.
It is not a tidy story and we are not going to tidy it. Once Bijutsu Techō borrowed the phrase it was cut loose from Miyasako's feminist argument and became, in curator Yukiko Yokoyama's assessment, an ambiguous concept that took on a life of its own. The issue's editor-in-chief was a man. Its only extended essay tied the artists relentlessly back to notions of “the feminine”. And of the thirty-nine women it featured, roughly half cannot now be confirmed to have continued working at all.
Some did, and are still working. Mika Yoshizawa exhibits and teaches. Shōko Maemoto resumed after a fifteen-year gap. Tomoko Ushijima left Tokyo for Fukuoka and has staged a run of solo museum exhibitions. Chie Matsui was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
UltraGirl Unlimited did not come from any of this, and we make no claim on it. We are recording it because it happened, because the term is older and more serious than most people assume, and because it was defined through a comic.
Source. Yukiko Yokoyama, “What were ‘Ultra Girls’? Women Artists in 1980s Japan”, published by AWARE — Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, June 16, 2023. Yokoyama is a curator at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.
AWARE is an independent research organisation with no connection to UltraGirl Unlimited. Read the full article — it is better than this summary of it.
Beyond the Mould
A familiar shape, made out of the wrong material on purpose.
In the first two cases the name is a metaphor. In this one it is an object. You can put it on your feet.
Melissa is a Brazilian footwear house, part of Grendene, which began in 1971 making plastic coverings for wine bottles. In 1979 it made a sandal instead. The Aranha was modelled on the woven footwear of French Riviera fishermen, rendered in moulded plastic, and it was an immediate success. Everything the brand has done since follows from that one substitution: take a familiar shape, make it out of the wrong material on purpose.
Somewhere in that catalogue sits a ballet flat called the Ultragirl. It is now in its third iteration, the Bow III, and it is stocked by Nordstrom, ASOS and Karen Millen. It is not a limited edition or a one-season novelty. It is a staple, and it has carried the name for years longer than we have.
Two details are worth knowing, because they explain why a plastic shoe gets taken seriously.
The first is the company it keeps. Melissa has put its moulds in the hands of Zaha Hadid, Vivienne Westwood, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld, Thierry Mugler, Jason Wu and Jeremy Scott. That is an architecture Pritzker winner and most of a century of fashion history, all working in recyclable PVC.
The second is the smell. Melissa shoes are scented, and the scent is legally protected — a registered scent mark, one of only eight currently active on the principal register at the US Patent and Trademark Office. There are more registered ways to protect a logo than there are protected smells in the country, and one of them belongs to a jelly shoe.
The shoes are moulded from Melflex, a PVC the company recycles, with no animal material and no animal testing anywhere in the process, registered vegan by the Vegan Society.
So the count stands at three. A prefix in endurance sport. A contested term in Japanese art criticism. And a ballet flat from Brazil. None of them were coordinated, none of them knew about the others, and none of them are wrong.
A note on this one. Melissa and Grendene S.A. have no connection to UltraGirl Unlimited, and nothing here is endorsed by or affiliated with them. The Ultragirl is their product and their trademark. We are describing it because it is part of the answer to the question at the top of this page, and for no other reason.