When making a long chain, you can take stitch markers or small pieces of spare yarn to mark every 20 or 30 chains. If you lose your place, at least it won't be too far back. If you like to do Foundation Single Crochet, you can easily substitute it for the foundation row. You could mark those at every 20 or 30 stitches to keep your place. If you really don't want to make this long foundation, that's okay too. I've provided the number of chains so you can work in a side-to-side direction instead.