Cranston’s first family: Mayor Fung and wife Barbara Ann Fenton keep competitive edge to family fun

Whether working out together or on a date night to Dave & Buster’s,

Fung and Fenton enjoy “a competitive marriage, with a lot of love.”

As busy newlyweds, Mayor Allan Fung and Barbara Ann Fenton seek side-by-side elliptical machines when they go to LA Fitness.

They are able to catch up, ask how each other’s day has been and comfort if necessary.

Yet in a rare night home together, Cranston’s first couple revealed another “critical” reason for wanting to work out next to each other.

They must eyeball the stride and speed of the other — and increase their output if they are being outshined.

“It’s a competitive marriage, with a lot of love,” said Fung, a likely Republican candidate for governor in 2018. He lost to Gov. Gina Raimondo the last time, and returned to leading the state’s third-largest city. It’s a post he has held since 2009.

Fung and Fenton describe their Dave & Buster’s dates as “brutal,” making fun of each other if 400 points aren’t reached in skee ball, trash-talking at the basketball shooting game and “going for the jugular” in air hockey.

Said Fenton, “But I don’t compete in cooking. That’s all him.”

Fung and Fenton met at the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. Fenton, a first-time delegate who had never met Fung previously, hit him with the umbrella she used during Hurricane Isaac, which had postponed the start of the convention.

Fung said he declined to voice his first thought — which was who uses an umbrella in this windy weather — because he found her so beautiful.

They had dated ever since, and Fenton, 11 years his junior at 36, became a sounding board as Fung campaigned for the top state post. She jokingly said then that it would be awkward if she were the “first girlfriend.”