Swimming drills in an endless pool
For a while I've put swimming on the back burner because it has been 'good enough' (36' for a half iron, and multiple training OWS of ~2.4 miles in 1:15 or so), but at some point in the next couple months I may go back to looking at a couple technique refinements to help maintain better speed consistency between the first and second half of the swim. One of our neighbors who we are friendly with has an endless pool, which I've been able to take advantage of in the past. The problem I ran into is that without any sort of distance demarcation, it was hard to tell whether I was actually getting any faster, so I went back to using a local pool. That allowed me to pick off the 'low hanging fruit' of my form and correct it.
Obviously, the overhead associated with walking two doors down the street is far less than driving across town and dealing with pool schedules - so I'm thinking this is a prime opportunity to revisit some more advanced drills and imprint new mechanics into muscle memory. The problem I can foresee is that again, I wont get a great idea of whether it is actually effective (or worse, sets me back) due to the endless pools' lack of a set distance.
I'm curious if others have suggestions as to ways to accomodate this. The only thought I have so far is to work on drills in the endless pool for a couple weeks, and then visit the real pool every so often and see how things translate to previous times in the real pool.